⋆. 𐙚˚࿔ lulu 𝜗𝜚˚⋆

Fred Weasley was an observer by nature. To be a successful prankster, one had to understand the intricate, shifting dynamics of Hogwarts better than the professors did. He knew which stairs skipped, which portraits gossiped, and, most importantly, he knew the people.

He knew you.

Before the whispers started, Fred knew you as Luna Lovegood's older sister. You were a seventh-year Ravenclaw, a girl with a brilliant, effortless laugh and a habit of leaving sketches of magical creatures on the library tables. You were bright, radiating a warm, quiet gravity. Fred had always thought you were breathtakingly pretty. He'd thrown a few casual, roguish winks your way in the corridors over the years, enjoying the pretty blush that used to dust your cheeks.

But that was before.

He vividly remembered a cold night last spring. He had been sneaking back from the kitchens when he saw you sprinting through the Entrance Hall. Your dress had been torn at the shoulder, your hair a chaotic mess, and you were sobbing so hard you couldn't catch your breath. Fred had stepped out of the shadows, his hand reaching out, asking if you were alright, but you had flinched violently away from him as if he were made of fire, disappearing into the dark.

Fred hadn't understood it then— he thought about that a lot, once he understood. Wondering if stopping you that night would have changed anything at all. Probably not. But it sat with him anyway, a small, useless guilt he never quite mentioned to you, folded into the deeper reason he found himself unable to look away once he finally noticed what the following year had done to you.— When the new term started, the pieces violently snapped together.

The boys spun a tale of a wild night, twisting the narrative until you were the villain, the "easy" girl, the homewrecker. And the school, hungry for scandal, swallowed it whole.

You didn't let yourself think about that night in whole pieces anymore. What remained were fragments, disconnected and strange, surfacing without warning: the particular feeling of not controlling your body. Music too loud. Voices and laughs. Hands all over your body. A door that wouldn't open the way you needed it to. After that, mostly static, the specific gray nothing of a memory your own mind had decided you weren't ready to hold whole.

Warrington and Higgs told their version quickly, before you'd found your footing enough to tell your own. Said you'd wanted it and cornered them. And because their version required nothing uncomfortable from anyone who chose to believe it, most of the school simply believed it. Both of them had girlfriends throughout — kept them after, too, walked the corridors with their arms slung easy around two Slytherin girls who either didn't know or didn't care, while you walked those same corridors alone. Nobody's mouth curled with disgust at their names. That imbalance felt like its own separate injury, layered on top of everything else.

There were photographs. You never let yourself look, couldn't have made yourself look even if someone had asked, but you knew they existed, knew some fraction of every stranger's face might have seen something you never agreed to show anyone.

The cruelty that followed took every shape that usually takes — group projects where you were quietly excluded, your things going missing with casual regularity, notes appearing on your desk with words you'd stopped letting yourself really read, more lies spread with your name.

Luna was the only steady thing through all of it, from the very first night onward and every night after. She'd climbed uninvited into your bed that first night and simply stayed until morning, offering nothing but her presence. She hexed exactly one person badly enough to earn a month's detention and never once regretted it. In the weeks that followed, she rearranged her entire schedule without telling you, appearing at your side between nearly every class, walking you the long way around whatever corridor had grown unsafe that week, sitting with you at meals when you couldn't face the Ravenclaw table, simply there, endlessly, unconditionally, the one fixed point in a world that had rearranged itself overnight into something unrecognizable. She never once made you explain yourself, never once looked at you like you were something broken, and you spent that whole terrible year understanding, more clearly than you'd ever understood anything, that you had a sister who would choose you over and over, forever, without needing to be asked.

You'd rebuilt something out of the wreckage, slowly. Not the girl you used to be — she felt unreachable and dangerous now, a stranger you remembered with rage and distant fondness. You became something new instead: quieter, sharper at the edges, careful in ways you hadn't needed to be careful before.

Now, you were a ghost. You wore oversized, heavy sweaters that swallowed your frame. You kept your head down. When you walked into the Great Hall, a localized winter seemed to follow you; girls would pull their bags closer, and boys would laugh behind their hands, both saying snarky comments about you.

She got a bad reputation

She takes the long way home

Fred watched you from the Gryffindor table, his eyebrows were so furrowed they looked as if they were about to leave a crease. He watched a passing student deliberately knock your books out of your hands. You didn't argue. You just knelt on the stone floor, quietly gathering your scattered, beautiful charcoal drawings, your hands trembling.

"Why are you staring at the Ravenclaw girl so much? She's the definition of trouble, dude." Lee Jordan warned softly, noticing the look on his friend's eyes. "She's got a bad reputation, besides she was pretty, now- i don't know Fred, she has been with half of the school they say, you don't want to get dragged into her mess. It'll ruin you"

Fred slowly turned his head to look at Lee. The easy-going, laughing joker was entirely gone. Now there was a curiosity, an itch that Fred couldn't scratch as he looked in your direction; how had you ended up like this? You looked so...alone, so scared all the time. What was the point of that in light of the rumors and 'truths' being said about you? He didn't understand.

"I don't know, man, it's just... Is she really a problem? Or did everyone just decide that? She seems scared of her own shadow, I don't think so, none of that," the redhead commented, his eyes fixed on you crouching on the ground, gathering the things that fell.

Fred stood up, ignoring George's sharp, evaluating look, and walked straight across the Great Hall. He didn't care who was watching. He crossed the floor, knelt down perfectly in front of you, and began picking up your charcoal pencils.

You flinched. It was a tiny, heartbreaking movement, your eyes darting up to his face with pure panic. Up close, Fred was massive. He was well over six feet, broad-shouldered and strong from years of Beater practice, and he saw the exact moment your brain registered him as a threat.

It broke his heart.

Fred immediately made himself smaller, dropping his shoulders and offering a soft, completely unthreatening smile. "You dropped your Niffler sketch," Fred murmured gently, holding the paper out to you. "It's brilliant, by the way. The shading on the snout is perfect."

You snatched the paper from his hand, your chest heaving. "Leave me alone, Weasley," you whispered harshly, your voice raw. "Don't you have a prank to do? People are staring. It doesn't suit you to be seen with me."

"I like the attention," Fred says smoothly, keeping his voice impossibly gentle. "Let me walk you to Charms and we can talk about-."

"I said leave me alone!" you snapped, your survival instincts kicking in. You bit back hard, trying to drive him away before he could hurt you. "I don't need you to do anything for me, and I don't want to be one of your jokes!"

You practically sprinted out of the Great Hall. Fred stayed kneeling on the floor for a long moment, watching you go. You were terrified, bruised, and lashing out at everything. But Fred Weasley was nothing if not patient.

He didn't know the whole story yet. He only knew he didn't like watching someone go dim who used to be so bright, and that dislike, small and stubborn, was the seed of everything that came after.

And all of my friends seen her naked

Or so the story goes

He watched you for weeks before he ever worked up a proper reason to talk to you again after that fiasco.

He told himself, at first, it was simple curiosity — the same instinct that made him notice any injustice worth noticing. But if he was honest with himself, alone at night with nothing but the truth for company, it was more than that. You were pretty. You'd always been pretty, in the easy way he'd noticed and half-forgotten a while ago, but there was something else now too, something that pulled at him harder than simple attraction — the specific ache of watching someone hold themselves together by sheer will, refusing to fully break even while an entire school seemed determined to push.

He caught himself looking for you in the library some evenings, in the Great Hall, in the gaps between classes, always at a careful distance, never quite finding the right moment to actually approach. He noticed the particular way you tucked yourself into the smallest available space in any room, the way your shoulders came up around your ears whenever someone laughed too loud nearby, the careful blankness you wore like a second uniform.

"What's with that red hair head of yours? You look...too level-headed to be Fred Weasley," George's girlfriend remarked, pointing at him with her fork. She was good at reading people—especially the Weasleys.

"I just don't like seeing her look like that" he told, watching you eat alone at the end of the Ravenclaw table one evening, and it was true, even if it wasn't the whole truth. He wanted to see you laugh again — the real kind, loud and startled out of you, the kind he half-remembered from years ago and hadn't seen since. He wanted, more than he examined closely at the time, simply to be near you.

"Do something about it then, mate, change things," George said, patting his brother on the back; knowing that look on Fred's face meant much more than he intended.

Mistakes we all make them

But they won't let it go, no

The courtyard confrontation was the thing that finally gave him his opening.

He heard them before he saw them. Warrington's voice —One of your attackers—, low and mean, pitched just loud enough to be heard by the people he wanted to hear it, cutting across the courtyard where you'd been sitting alone with a book.

"Oi. Heard you've been keeping to yourself this week, Bit late for that, isn't it? Many guys have already been through you"

Higgs —the other attacker— laughed, that ugly, easy laugh boys like that always seemed to have ready.

You didn't look up from your book, You were sadly used to it. After the incident and the stupid and cruel version they peddled about what happened, the rumors only escalated. From taking something that was partially true—in In the sense that they were the ones who did that to you—and twisted it to their advantage by saying you wanted it, the rest just...created lies about you; guys you didn't even know saying they were with you, they paid you for services, girls swearing they saw you flirting with their boyfriends, people even implying you were probably with teachers. Your life became a circus of lies and distortion.

Fred, watching from the covered walkway, saw the way your hand had gone very still on the page, the only sign the words had landed anywhere at all.

He crossed the courtyard before he'd fully decided to.

"Something funny?" Fred said, dropping onto the bench directly between you and them, uninvited and entirely unbothered about it.

Warrington's grin faltered slightly. "This isn't your business, Weasley."

"Funny, I thought harassing someone in a public courtyard sort of made it everyone's business. Sort of the whole point of doing it in public, isn't it — wanting an audience." Fred's voice stayed light, almost pleasant, which somehow made it worse for the two of them than if he'd shouted. "Though I notice you didn't say anything remotely clever. Bit of a letdown, honestly. All that reputation for being such a laugh, and this is the material you've got. Does your girlfriend know this is how you spend your free periods, by the way? Might be worth mentioning."

Something flickered across Warrington's face — real discomfort, quickly buried.

"Watch it."

"Or what?" Fred tilted his head, genuinely curious. His large body shielding you from their view, intimidating them at the same time without needing to make an effort. "You'll say something else cruel to a girl who's done nothing except sit here reading? Terrifying stuff. I'm shaking."

The two of them muttered something unintelligible and moved off, and Fred watched them go with his jaw tight before he let himself relax.

He turned to you then, and you'd gone back to staring at your book, though your eyes hadn't moved down the page in several minutes.

"You didn't have to do that," you said, not looking up. "It's not your problem and I didn't ask for help.

"I know I didn't have to and you didn't ask" Fred shrugged, easy. "Wanted to, though. There's a difference."

"They'll just say something else next time. This doesn't fix anything."

"Probably not," Fred agreed. "But it's mildly satisfying watching them fumble for an insult and come up empty. I'll take the small wins where I can get them."

You looked up at him properly then, for the first time, something wary and assessing in your expression, like you were trying to work out what angle he was playing. He was close enough now that you registered, distantly, how much taller he was than you'd remembered — broad through the shoulders in the way boys got from years of Quidditch, tall enough that he'd had to fold himself down slightly to fit comfortably on the bench beside you. It should have been intimidating. Somehow, sitting there with his easy, unhurried posture, it wasn't.

"I'm not a joke or a charity project" you said finally. "In case that's where this is going. I don't need rescuing."

"Wasn't under the impression you did," Fred said, unbothered. "You handled yourself fine before I sat down. I just don't love watching people be cruel to someone for sport, and I had five minutes free, so." He shrugged again. "No joke. No project. Just didn't feel like doing nothing."

You studied him a moment longer, and something in his easy honesty seemed to land somewhere real, because the wariness eased, just slightly, at the edges.

"We haven't spoken in a while.," you said. "Since the divination substitute joke, it got us detention."

"You remember that." Fred looked genuinely pleased. "I'm flattered."

"You were memorably annoying," you said, and the corner of your mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but close enough that Fred noticed it, and filed it away, and decided, with an unexpected certainty, that he very much wanted to see the whole thing someday. "Did the stories about me keep you away? Now you want a taste of my mouth too? Leave me alone, Weasley. I don't believe your words." You snapped again, getting up abruptly and walking away from him, leaving Fred with the bitter feeling of having lost his recent victory.

Now, it was clear to him that his words weren't something you could easily trust, but he was determined.

The campaign to earn your trust was agonizingly slow, and Fred had to unlearn everything he knew about flirting. His usual method—loud, boisterous, invading personal space—would only terrify you. He needed to be a safe harbor, not a storm.

You thought that was the end of your encounters with Fred Weasley, but you couldn't have been more wrong. He kept appearing in your life, over the following weeks.

You ignored him in the library twice, burying yourself in a book and not looking up even when he sat two tables away, clearly hoping to be noticed. You gave him one-word answers in the corridors, sharp and final, designed to end conversations rather than continue them. Once, when he offered to carry a stack of books that had slipped from your arms, you snatched them back before he could touch them, muttering something about not needing help, and walked off without a backward glance.

Cause she's got a bad reputation

But I know what they don't,

"She hates me," Fred told George one night, more bewildered than discouraged.

"She doesn't hate you," George said, not looking up from the parchment he was scribbling on. "She's protecting herself. Different thing entirely, even if it looks the same from where you're standing."

"Feels the same, some days."

"Give it time. People who've been hurt that badly don't just decide to trust someone because he's persistent and reasonably charming. They test. They push. They see if you'll actually stick, or if you're just another person who'll get tired of the difficulty eventually." George glanced up. "You planning on getting tired?"

"No," Fred said, immediately, with more certainty than he'd expected from himself.

"Then keep showing up. Eventually the testing runs out before you do."

And I don't care what they say about you baby

They don't know what you've been through

Being interested in you, Fred discovered quickly, came with unsolicited advice attached, from nearly everyone who considered themselves entitled to offer it — which, given how many people considered themselves Fred's friend, turned out to be a great many people.

"You want to be careful there," a Hufflepuff boy said, catching him in a corridor with an expression of grave concern. "That one's — well. You know."

"I don't, actually. Enlighten me."

The guy had the decency to look uncomfortable and moved on without finishing the thought.

Alicia Spinnet cornered him with something closer to genuine worry. A seventh-year he barely knew delivered an entire unsolicited lecture about reputation. A girl from his own year, someone he'd always considered a friend, pulled him aside with misguided delicacy. "There are plenty of girls who'd be thrilled to have your attention, Fred. Girls without all that complication attached."

"Complication," Fred repeated, flat. "That's an interesting word for surviving something horrific and then getting punished for it by an entire school too lazy to check their facts."

It didn't stop there. Over the following weeks, the rumors reaching him multiplied and mutated, each one uglier and more inventive than the last, as though the school had turned cruelty into a competitive sport. He heard, from three different people in the space of a single day, that you'd been caught with a seventh-year Slytherin in a broom cupboard, that you'd slept with half the Quidditch team, that you'd once shown up to a professor's office hours wearing considerably less than the dress code required. He heard that you were a boyfriend-stealer, that you'd gone after someone's fiancé, that the whole 'victim act' was a performance you put on whenever you got caught.

"She seduces them and then plays scared when it doesn't work out the way she wanted," a Ravenclaw prefect told him once, with the particular authority of someone repeating something they'd heard exactly once and decided to believe completely. "Ask anyone."

"I have asked people," Fred said, sharp. "Nobody's ever given me a single fact. Just secondhand stories from someone who heard it from someone else. That's not information, that's just cruelty with extra steps."

He denied every single one, out loud, whenever he had the chance — not gently, not diplomatically, but with a flat, immovable certainty that left no room for negotiation. It cost him some goodwill. A few people stopped inviting him to things, uncomfortable with how forcefully he pushed back. He found he didn't particularly care.

What wore on him more than the rumors themselves was the sheer volume of unsolicited opinion attached to caring about you at all — as if his affection for you had become public property, something everyone felt entitled to weigh in on, correct, or warn him away from. He hadn't asked a single person for their thoughts. He got them anyway, constantly, from people who'd never once bothered to actually speak to you.

"I didn't ask," he told Katie Bell once, more tired than angry. "I never asked any of you what you thought about this. I don't need the opinion. I need people to stop treating a story they made up as something they're entitled to keep repeating at me."

But the warnings outnumbered the encouragement, and Fred found something clarifying in that — every warning only confirmed how wrong the whole situation was.

When people said no, he only found more desire to say yes, always having a taste for the complicated and impossible.

It was in the middle of all this that he made another mistake with you; Not thinking about the repercussions of their actions on you, how they were going to affect YOU.

He was crossing the courtyard with a knot of friends — Lee, Angelina, a couple from the Quidditch team — mid-conversation, laughing at something, when he spotted you passing at the edge of the crowd, alone, moving quickly the way you always moved now, trying not to be noticed.

He left mid-sentence. Didn't even finish the joke he'd been telling, just peeled off from his own friends without explanation and jogged to catch up with you, easy and unthinking, the way he'd have done for anyone he liked.

"Hey. Where are you headed? I'll walk with you."

You stopped, and your whole body went tight, eyes darting past him to where his friends stood watching, openly curious, then back to him.

"Don't," you said, low, urgent. "Please. Just — leave me alone."

"I don't mind the company, if you—"

"It's not about whether you mind." Your voice cracked slightly, frustration and fear tangled together. "Everyone's watching. It doesn't help you to be seen with me, Fred. It just makes you the next thing people talk about. Go back to your friends."

You walked away before he could answer, faster now, and Fred stood there in the middle of the courtyard, his friends' curious eyes still on him, understanding for the first time just how carefully you'd learned to calculate the cost of every interaction, and how little any of it had to do with whether you actually wanted him gone.

"You alright, mate?" Lee asked, once he'd rejoined them, glancing between Fred and the direction you'd disappeared.

"She seems to hate you, don't you think?" Angelina assessed, looking in the direction you had gone; unsure which version of events was correct, but always choosing to side with women until proven otherwise with compelling evidence.

"She was just in a hurry, I'll see her later," Fred murmured, embarrassed and confused, scratching the back of his neck uncertainly.

He didn't see what happened next. You did.

You'd barely made it two corridors away before a cluster of girls fell into step around you, boxing you in against the wall with the casual, practiced cruelty of people who'd done this before. You recognized a few of them — girls who'd never spoken a single word to you before that moment, girls who'd apparently decided your business was suddenly, urgently theirs.

"What was that, then?" one of them said, arms crossed, blocking your path forward. "Fred Weasley, chasing after you across the courtyard? Bit desperate, isn't it, even for you."

"Move," you said, low, tired, wanting nothing more than to disappear.

"Or what?" Another girl pushed your shoulder, not hard, but enough to make the point. "Are you trying to get your claws into him too? Heard you'll go after anyone these days. Is that the plan? Land yourself a Weasley so you've got someone to defend you?"

"You're disgusting, you know that?" the first girl added, shoving you again, harder this time. "Following him around like that. Does he know what you actually are?"

Something in you, worn thin by over a year of exactly this, finally cracked.

"I didn't follow him anywhere," you snapped, and your voice came out louder and steadier than you expected, surprising even yourself. "He came to me. I told him to leave me alone. Maybe if any of you spent five seconds actually asking me a question instead of deciding you already know the answer, you'd know that. But that would require you to care about the truth instead of the story, and clearly none of you do."

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." You straightened, spine locking, something old and buried finally finding its voice. "I'm so tired of all of you. Tired of being shoved into walls by people who've never spoken a single kind word to me. Tired of being a story you get to tell instead of a person you bothered to know. So move, or don't, but I'm done apologizing for existing near your precious Weasley."

"What's going on here?"

Angelina's voice cut through the group like a blade, sharp and unimpressed, George's girlfriend appearing right behind her, both of them taking in the scene — you boxed in, the cluster of girls around you — with immediate, unmistakable understanding.

"We were just talking," one of the girls said, already backing off.

"Doesn't look like talking to me,it does to you angie?" the Hufflepuff girl said, mild and dangerous all at once. "Looks like five of you cornering one of her. Very brave. Very fair fight."

"She's clearly obsessed with Fred, we were just—"

"You were just leaving," Angelina cut in, flat, daring any of them to argue. "Go on. Before I decide this is worth reporting properly."

The group dispersed, muttering, and you were left standing there, still shaking slightly, adrenaline and old fear tangled together in your chest.

"You didn't need to do that," you told them both, once the corridor had emptied. "Any of it. I could have handled it."

"You were handling it," Angelina said, something like respect in her voice. "Better than most people would've, honestly. We just didn't feel like watching you finish handling it alone."

"Thank you," you said, and meant it more than the words could properly carry. "Both of you."

"Anytime," they say, easy, warm. "Seriously. Anytime at all."

Angelina and George's girlfriend found Fred later that same evening, and didn't bother softening the account.

"You made her life harder today," Angelina told him, bluntly, watching his face fall. "Chasing after her in front of an audience like that. A whole pack of girls cornered her not ten minutes after you walked off, wanting to know if she was trying to get her claws into you. She stood up for herself, she impressive btw— but she shouldn't have had to. That's the cost of you doing something that felt completely normal to you, Fred. It wasn't normal for her. It never will be, not the way things are right now."

Fred sat with that for a long time after they'd gone, something heavy and new settling into his chest — the first real understanding that even his kindness, offered carelessly, could cost you something he'd never had to pay himself.

Trust me, I could be the one to treat you like a lady

Let me see what's underneath, all I need is you

With his observant nature, Fred decided to change his approach to you, to try another angle;

It started with a nickname.

You were easily startled, hyper-vigilant in the corridors. Whenever someone walked up behind you, your shoulders would instantly lock. Fred noticed. So, he developed a system.

"Morning, Angel," Fred's low, warm voice rumbled from a safe three feet behind you in the library.

You stopped sorting your Arithmancy charts. Angel. It was a quiet, affectionate little nickname he had randomly used one day, and it had stuck. Now, whenever he approached, he made sure to say it before he entered your peripheral vision. It was a verbal knock on the door. It told you exactly who was behind you, ensuring you never had to panic.

"What do you want, Fred?" you asked, though the biting edge in your voice had dulled considerably over the last three weeks.

"Just delivering the post," Fred said cheerfully. He didn't sit down. He respected the invisible boundary you kept around yourself. He simply dropped a small, expertly folded origami bird onto your textbook, gave you a bright, soft smile, and walked away.

You watched his broad back disappear behind the bookshelves before cautiously tapping the paper bird with your wand.

The origami bird sprang to life, fluttering its paper wings. It didn't explode. It didn't shout a joke. Instead, it unfolded itself into a small, neat square of parchment, bearing Fred's slanted handwriting:

'Your hair catch the light when you read by the window, You look like you're on fire, you just look so beautiful today, Angel. — F.'

A hot, involuntary flush crept up your neck. It wasn't the first note. Over the past month, Fred had been slipping these quiet, magically folded compliments into your life. He noticed your drawings. He noticed the way you helped elves. He noticed the slight change on the color of your eyes. He was systematically attempting to rebuild the self-worth that the castle had tried to strip away from you.

You quickly folded the note and shoved it into your pocket, fighting the terrifying, dangerous warmth blooming in your chest.

Luna, your lovely sister, was watching all of this unfold from her own quiet vantage point, never once intervened directly. She never pushed you toward him. She simply, patiently, made room for things to happen and stay close to it to see your reaction.

You caught her watching the two of you that same day, when Fred had tried and failed, again, to coax more than three words out of you.

"You could tell him to stop," Luna observed, not looking up from the copy of the Quibbler she held upside down. "If you actually wanted him to, he would stop if you properly say it"

"I don't— i know—it's just…complicated, but I don't want him to."

"I know," Luna said, simply, and went back to her magazine, and you found, not for the first time, that your sister always seemed to know things about you before you'd finished admitting them to yourself.

Fred kept trying, undeterred by rejection, though he adjusted his tactics as the weeks wore on — less direct approach, more sideways offering, small kindnesses left where you'd find them without an audience attached. He was really trying.

You hated how much you noticed him.

Not just the obvious things — though those were hard to ignore too, the sheer, absurd size of him folding himself into library chairs built for smaller people, the easy warmth in his voice even when he was being ridiculous. It was smaller than that, quieter. The way he still made you want to laugh, even now, even guarded as you'd become. The way some worn-down, stubborn part of you lit up, just slightly, every time his voice found you in a crowded room.

You remembered him from before, if you let yourself. Not in any grand, significant way — just ordinary fragments, the kind that only became significant in hindsight. A detention in third year you'd both been given for an entirely unrelated prank gone sideways, the two of you trading increasingly ridiculous excuses while scrubbing trophies, until Filch had to separate you for laughing too loudly. A running joke about a hopeless divination substitute that had somehow lasted two entire terms. A wink thrown your way in a crowded corridor once, casual and easy, that had made you blush for reasons you hadn't examined closely at the time.

You'd liked him. Quietly, the way you liked a lot of things back then, without needing to make a production of it. He'd been funny in a way that felt effortless rather than performed, kind in the small unremarkable ways that never asked for credit. If things had gone differently — if April had never happened, if the person you used to be had gotten to stay — you thought, sometimes, that you might have let yourself want this a long time ago, simply and without all the fear currently wrapped around it.

That was exactly why you couldn't let it happen now.

She got a bad reputation

Nobody gets too close

You knew, with a clarity that frightened you, precisely what it would cost him to be seen with you — the whispers, the warnings, the slow erosion of a reputation he'd built without ever needing to fight for it. You'd already watched it happen once, that very day, his friends' curious eyes following him across the courtyard. You didn't want to be the reason people looked at Fred Weasley differently. You didn't want to drag someone that bright down into the same grey, suffocating hell you'd been living in for over a year.

It would be so much easier, you told yourself, to simply keep him at a distance. Safer for him. Safer for you, too — wanting something you couldn't have was its own particular cruelty, and you'd had quite enough cruelty for one lifetime already.

But some stubborn, unconvinced part of you kept hoping he wouldn't listen to any of that. And that frightened you more than anything else.

You tried to talk to Luna about it, one evening, in the roundabout, careful way you talked about anything that mattered now.

"Sometimes I think about who I used to be," you admitted, staring at your hands rather than at your sister. "The loud one. The one who wore whatever she wanted and laughed too easily and didn't calculate every single interaction before she had it. And I think — if she'd just been quieter. Smaller. Less obviously happy. Maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe they wouldn't have looked twice."

Luna went very still, the way she did when something mattered enough to warrant her full, uninterrupted attention.

"You're angry at her," Luna said. Not a question.

"I don't know what I am. I just — I resent her, sometimes. That girl. For being so careless with herself. For not seeing it coming. And then I hate myself for resenting her, because none of it was her fault, and I know that, logically, I do — but knowing it and feeling it aren't the same thing, and I can't seem to make the feeling catch up."

"That's the cage," Luna said, quiet, certain. "The one I keep telling you that you built, and let other people help build. You resent the girl you used to be, and you can't forgive yourself for surviving what happened to her, and you won't let either feeling go, because letting go would mean admitting neither of them was ever fair to hold onto in the first place."

"It wasn't my fault," you said, though it came out smaller than you meant it to, like you were still convincing yourself.

"I know it wasn't. You know it wasn't, somewhere underneath all of this. But you don't talk about any of it — not to me, not really, not even now. You've gotten so good at protecting everyone else from the weight of it that you won't even let yourself feel it properly. You're so afraid of becoming her again — loud, open, easy to hurt — that you've stopped letting yourself be anyone at all. You avoid yourself, sister. That's the real problem. Not what happened. What you've done to survive it."

You didn't have an answer for that, not right away. But you sat with it, turning it over, and something in you recognized, with quiet horror, exactly how true it was.

"I don't know how to stop," you admitted finally.

"You don't have to know yet," Luna said, gentle now, reaching for your hand. "You just have to stop pretending you don't need to. That's usually where it starts."

The turning point in the Gryffindor dynamic happened on a rainy Tuesday in the common room.

Fred was reviewing a prototype for a new joke, while Lee Jordan and a few other seventh-years were chatting near the fire. The conversation drifted to the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend, and inevitably, to the gossip.

"I heard that she actually asked a guy to make out in a teacher's office! " Lee remarked casually, tossing a piece of popcorn into the air. "I mean, look at her. She looks miserable now, but she still keeps doing those things, just—No smoke without fire, right?"

Fred's patience snapped.

The sound was like a gunshot. Fred stood up, kicking his chair back so violently it crashed into a table. In two strides, he was across the room, grabbing the front of Lee's robes and slamming him hard against the stone wall.

"Say another bloody word about her," Fred snarled, his face twisted in absolute, blinding rage, his broad shoulders completely boxing Lee in. "Say it, Jordan. I'll break your jaw."

George caught his arm before the fist could land, hauling him back a step. "Fred. Stop." He turned to Lee, voice calm but serious. "You know that's not on, right?"

"Everyone says stuff like that about her—"

"That's exactly the problem." George's tone made the whole common room go quiet. "You've got a mum, Lee. Cousins. Probably a daughter someday, if that's the life you want. Would you want anyone talking about them the way you just talked about her? Fred and I have a sister. If i heard someone talk about Ginny like that, I'd swing first too. The only difference is you don't think it counts because she's not someone you care about. That's the thing that needs to stop being true. What we let slide is the world we're building for every woman who matters to us down the line."

Lee sat with that, discomfort plain on his face. "I didn't think about it like that. That was out of order."

The incident shifted everything.

The next day in the Great Hall, when a Slytherin girl muttered a slur as you walked past, Hermione loudly slammed her textbook shut and publicly threatened to hex the girl into oblivion.

You didn't thank her, you couldn't; you were still afraid to express anything and that it would all end up being an elaborate joke against you. But at the same time, something inside you screamed that that wasn't the intention and then for the first time in months, you weren't entirely alone with your sister, there were finally more people who saw you...as you were and not what others said.

Hermione found you in the library not long after, sitting down across from you without waiting for an invitation.

"I've been meaning to properly introduce myself," she said. "I don't think we've ever actually talked. I'd like to, if you're amenable."

You were wary, at first, the way you were wary of everyone new, but Hermione's directness made it hard to stay guarded for long — she asked real questions, listened properly to the answers, never once tiptoed around your history but never pried into it either.

"I like your theory about why Nifflers are drawn to anything shiny rather than anything valuable specifically," Hermione said, once, examining one of your sketchbook pages you'd left open by accident. "Most people assume it's about worth. I think you're right that it's actually about attention — they want the thing that catches the eye, not the thing that's technically precious. That's rather clever, actually."

Nobody had complimented your thinking that specifically in longer than you could remember, and you found yourself, slowly, looking forward to Hermione's company in a way you hadn't expected to.

Ron and Harry followed Hermione's lead within weeks, folding you into their orbit with the same easy, undemanding welcome — Ron greeting you as you enter the great hall with the same blunt enthusiasm he have with everyone, no careful edges, which felt, oddly, like a relief after months of people treating you like poison; Harry, quieter, sharing a knowing look with you sometimes that suggested he understood something about being defined by a story you never chose, though neither of you ever needed to say it outright.

It became a habit, over the following weeks — Hermione seeking you out, pulling you gently into her orbit, and the group along with her. And one time when she overheard two Ravenclaw girls repeating an old, ugly joke about you in the corridor, she didn't hesitate.

"That's not funny, and it's not true, and I'd genuinely like to know why either of you think repeating it makes you clever," Hermione said, stopping directly in front of them, immovable. "You don't know her. You've decided something about her based on a story two idiots made up to protect themselves. I'd think a bit harder about that, if I were you."

The girls didn't have a response. Word of the exchange spread, as these things did, and slowly, deliberately, Hermione's clear, public loyalty became one more thread in the growing web of people who'd decided, out loud and without apology, that you were worth defending.

"Thank you," you told her afterward, still a little stunned by the directness of it. "You didn't have to do that."

"Yes, I did," Hermione said, simply. "Quiet kindness is lovely, but it doesn't undo a year of public cruelty on its own. Sometimes the correction has to be just as visible as the original unfairness, or it doesn't actually shift anything."

It was around this same period that Fred learned something uncomfortable about himself, entirely by accident.

He'd fallen into step beside a Hufflepuff girl in the corridor one afternoon, out of pure habit — an easy, flirtatious opening line, the kind of thing Fred had said to a dozen girls without a second thought over the years, harmless in his own mind, just the ordinary currency of teenage flirtation.

He didn't notice anything wrong until your reaction later that day, in the library, when he tried the same easy, teasing register with you — some light joke about your reading choices, nothing unusual for him — and watched something flicker across your face that he'd never seen there before. Not annoyance. Something closer to alarm, quickly smoothed over, the kind of flinch a body makes before the mind catches up to explain it.

"What was that? " Fred asked, gentle, immediately abandoning whatever joke he'd been building toward.

"Nothing."

"It wasn't nothing. You went somewhere else for a second, Angel."

You were quiet for a long moment, weighing whether to say it.

"That thing you do," you said finally, careful. "The easy charm. The teasing, confident thing you do with girls, like it's just automatic and.. normal but when you did it just now, with me, it landed differently than I think you meant it to."

Fred sat with that, uncomfortable in a way he wasn't used to sitting with things.

"I didn't mean anything by it," he said. "It's just how I talk. Harmless, I always thought."

"I know you didn't mean anything. I'm not accusing you of anything." You picked at the corner of your book. "It's not really about you specifically. It's that easy confidence — the assumption that a girl's going to enjoy the attention, that flirting is just something owed, automatic, no real thought behind whether she wants it in that particular moment — that's part of what got twisted into something much worse for me. Not by you. But it's close enough to the shape of it that it catches me off guard sometimes."

Fred didn't say anything defensive. He let the discomfort of it actually land.

"I think I've never really had to think about that," he admitted, slowly, working it out as he said it. "Whether the girl actually wants the attention in that specific moment, or whether I'm just assuming she does because most of them seemed to, before. That's not really fair, is it? Assuming."

"It's not really about fair and isn't your fault. You don't do it with bad intentions, it's simply society that...makes assumptions about what women want or don't want, and somehow that scares me, it disgusts me now, I can't help it…I-i think that things have to be about paying attention. Actually checking, instead of assuming."

"I'll pay more attention," Fred said, and meant it with a seriousness that surprised even him. "To you. And I think — probably to everyone else too, from here on."

He got the chance to prove it a few weeks later, in a corridor near the Charms classroom, when a group of younger girls stopped him with the particular giggling boldness of fourth-years testing out flirtation for the first time, one of them clearly working up the nerve to ask him something.

The old Fred would have played along without a second thought — easy, charming, harmless fun, exactly the kind of interaction he'd never once questioned before. Instead, he found himself pausing, actually reading the room, checking whether the attention he was about to offer was wanted or simply assumed, and in turn, questioning whether he wanted to do it or was simply going to answer out of pure reflex.

"Sorry, I'm a bit behind for class," he said, kind but definite, not performing the flirtation the moment seemed to be angling for. "Another time, maybe."

He caught George watching the exchange afterward, eyebrows raised.

"You've gone quiet with the flirting lately."

"Not quiet. Just — i don't want it, i thinking about it first. Turns out that's a step I used to skip entirely."

"Huh," George said, considering. "Suits you, honestly. Didn't expect falling for someone to turn you thoughtful, but here we are; You're becoming just like me!" George joked at the end, earning complaints from his brother and a couple of laughs.

You didn't say anything else about it that day in the library, months earlier, when the conversation first happened. But something shifted between you, some small, real trust earned in the space of that uncomfortable, honest exchange, and Fred carried the lesson forward more carefully than he'd carried most lessons in his life — not as a single correction, but as an ongoing practice, tested and retested, month after month, until it simply became part of who he was rather than something he had to remember to do.

But these changes couldn't stop the memories or the actions of others.

A sight of a soul when it's breaking

Making my heart grow cold

It happened during a crowded period between classes. A group of older Slytherin boys pushed past you in the corridor. One of them—Warrington—deliberately he moved his hand over your butt. He leaned in, whispering something filthy in your ear, before laughing and walking away with his friends cheering him.

Your vision tunneled. The air in the corridor evaporated. The walls of Hogwarts suddenly felt like they were crushing your ribs.

You stumbled backward, gasping for air, your hands flying to your ears as you slid down the stone wall in a secluded alcove. The panic attack hit you with the force of a physical blow. You were back in that dark room. You could feel his hands on you. You couldn't breathe.

"Angel?"

The voice was alarmed, but it stayed exactly where it was. Fred rounded the corner, his eyes widening as he saw you curled into a ball on the floor, hyperventilating.

He moved toward you instinctively, but as his large, imposing shadow fell over you, you shrieked, pressing yourself harder against the stones. 'Too big. He's too big. He's a man.'

Fred understood instantly.

He threw himself backward, putting a solid five feet of distance between you. He dropped to his knees, making himself as small as physically possible, keeping his hands flat on the floor where you could see them.

"I'm right here, Angel," Fred said, his voice a low, steady rumble, stripped of all its usual volume. He didn't approach. He didn't try to touch you. "You're safe. You're in the corridor. It's Tuesday. I'm not going to touch you. I'm just going to sit right here on the floor until you can catch your breath."

You sobbed, your chest heaving, your eyes locked onto his face. Fred kept his gaze perfectly steady, radiating an absolute, unshakeable calm that he definitely didn't feel. He stayed on the cold stone floor for twenty minutes, talking to you about nonsense—about George's newest invention idea, about his mother's knitting, about anything that would anchor you to the present.

Slowly, the tunnel vision receded. Your breathing hitched, slowing down to a shuddering rhythm.

Fred didn't move until you finally leaned your head back against the wall, exhausted. Only then did he slowly slide his Gryffindor hoodie off over his head. He tossed it gently so it landed next to your knee.

"It's cold," Fred whispered. "Put that on. Nobody's going to bother you while you're wearing my colors and my name, darling."

You looked at the oversized, worn red hoodie.

You and Fred both knew it was a lie—a harmless little lie—that as soon as other people saw you, there would be more rumors and sharp comments about you, but you chose to believe him. You chose to feel comforted by his warmth and pretend that, if nothing had happened to you, you would just be two young people flirting and sharing a nice moment.

You chose to live that little fanciful lie.

Your hands were shaking as you pulled it over your head. It swallowed you whole, smelling fiercely of cinnamon and safety. You looked at Fred, still kneeling five feet away, giving you all the power, all the control.

"Thanks...for the patience and the chat-and-and the hoodie"

The silence between you stretched for a few moments.

"It smells better than I expected from you," you teased softly, the curve of your mouth rising.

Fred feel it like a victory and for the first time since the assault, you didn't want to run away from a man. You wanted him closer.

That slow progression of you relying on him was agonizing, beautiful, and deeply confusing for Fred. It started with proximity — sitting close enough in the library that your shoulders brushed, neither of you moving away. Then it became a habit — Fred's arm slung loosely along the back of whatever bench you shared, not quite touching you, close enough that you could lean into it if you wanted to, which, eventually, you did. Then it became something closer to comfort. But there was always a barrier, a flinch, a hesitation.

He was enormous, up close — taller than you by a full head, broad enough through the shoulders that his jumper swallowed you whole, strong enough that you'd watched him lift furniture other boys needed to be two for. Most days, you found you liked it — liked the solid, unhurried warmth of him, the way he never seemed to notice or mind his own size, just took up space easily and let you borrow some of that ease when you needed it.

Over the following weeks, it became something you both reached for more readily: his fingers, absent and easy in your hand; your head resting against his chest while he explained some ridiculous new joke-shop idea; his hand finding yours under a table, thumb tracing slow circles against your knuckles, an anchor rather than a demand.

None of it was romantic in the traditional sense, not yet — nothing that asked anything of you beyond comfort freely given and freely received. But it built, patient and constant, into something that felt, increasingly, like the safest place you had.

There were still moments, even if you tried to avoid them, when his size did something else entirely — a hand closing too fast around your arm to steady you on an uneven step, and your whole body locking rigid before you recognized who it was. Fred let go immediately every time, adjusting without complaint, always announcing himself now before closing any distance, making himself smaller in all the ways that mattered without ever once making you feel guilty for needing it.

Fred didn't know what he was doing.

One weekend, Fred cornered George and his girlfriend (a sweet, brilliant Hufflepuff pureblood who George had been entirely obsessed with for two years before she finally gave in), in the common room.

"I need advice," Fred muttered, rubbing his face. "I don't want to mess this up, George. I really don't."

The girl offered a warm, empathetic smile. "She's trying, Fred. I think —From what you're saying— that she likes you. But her body doesn't know it's fully safe yet. You have to let her lead."

"Took me two years to get Sunshine to look at me and leave that bloke, Freddie," George said quietly, clapping his twin on the shoulder.

"And i didn't go through half the hell that girl went through. You have to be patient. You can't pretend to fix her. You just have to love her while she fixes herself." She added kindly.

But Fred, in his fierce protectiveness, inevitably messed up.

A week later, you found out Fred had actively threatened a group of Ravenclaws who had refused to partner with you in Potions. You were furious. You dragged him into an empty classroom, your eyes blazing.

"I didn't ask you to fight my battles, Fred!" you shouted, the oversized sleeves of his hoodie pulled over your hands. "I am not a broken toy for you to fix! I am not your property for you to be a caveman resorting to violence over me! You stepping in and threatening people just makes me look horrible! It makes it look like I need a big, strong man to survive!"

"You needed someone in your corner!" Fred yelled back, his own frustration and desperation boiling over. "I can't just stand by and watch them tear you apart, Angel! It kills me!"

"Then look away!" you cried, tears of pure frustration spilling over. "Because you can't erase what happened! You can't beat up the past, Fred! You can't solve this for me, and if you think you can, then you don't understand it at all!"

You stormed out, leaving Fred entirely gutted for days.

He sought Molly out the following weekend, home for a visit while the others sat in the kitchen with hot drinks — George and his girlfriend close together on one bench, Harry, Ginny, Ron and Hermione deep in their own conversation.

Fred found his mother alone by the sink.

"Mum. Can I talk to you about someone?"

Molly set down the cup she'd been drying. "Of course love."

"There's a girl—actually — you might've heard Ginny or some of the girls mention her. She's amazing, Mom, she has eyes that— I don't know, Just when they look at you they make you feel 'wooow' and it's sweet, kind, brave because—well, you know?" Fred paused, a silly smile spread across his face, ignoring Molly's mental effort to follow her son's strange and lovestruck explanation. "She makes me want to be a better man, a better person; she's everything that's right, and I don't think I've ever wanted to do things right with a girl so much. Besides, did I tell you she draws? she's properly talented, though she'd never say so herself. She's got this laugh that used to fill up whole rooms before this year, and getting even a piece of it back out of her feels like the best thing I've ever managed to do with my time. I think about her constantly, Mum. Not in the fun way, either — I mean I actually worry, all the time, whether I'm doing right by her."

Fred's voice drops to something more restrained; a mixture of sadness and anger. His brows furrow as he tries to find a way to express a pain that isn't his own.

"Something enormous happened to her last spring; Two boys disrespected her and—and took advantage of her… that wasn't her fault, not even slightly, and instead of the people responsible facing any of it, she's the one who's spent over a year paying for it, They all chose to blame her! Spreading stupid rumors and treating her badly when she doesn't deserve it."

He raised his eyes, meeting his mother's warm and understanding gaze. "I care about her more than I've ever cared about any girl, and I don't know how to help her properly. I keep getting it wrong — trying to fix things that aren't mine to fix."

Molly's whole expression had softened, listening. "That sounds like a great deal to be carrying, both of you."

"How do I help her, Mum? Properly. Not just showing up angry and throwing punches, though apparently I've been doing plenty of that."

"Helping looks like listening more than you speak," Molly said. "It looks like asking what she needs instead of guessing. It looks like being steady on the days she's not, without needing credit for the steadiness. You can't love someone healed, Fred. You can only love them exactly as they are, and trust that your presence matters even when it's not fixing anything at all."

"That's harder than throwing a punch."

"Infinitely harder," Molly agreed, smiling. "That's what being a good man actually looks like, more often than the dramatic version you probably picture." She studied her son for a long moment, something proud and a little misty in her expression. "You've grown up a great deal this year, you know. I don't say that lightly. Bring her round sometime! I'd really like to meet her."

Fred apologized the next time he saw you. It was a sincere, ego-less apology that melted the remaining ice around your heart. He promised to let you handle your own battles.

"You keep trying to solve this," you said, sharper than you meant, when Fred suggested going to Dumbledore together, already having drafted most of what he wanted to say. "You've decided you're going to fix this for me, and that's not your decision to make. You can't help by deciding what I need before I've decided it myself. I am grateful for the fury and the fists — but none of it helps me sit with the parts I haven't processed. It just gives me one more enormous thing to process on top of everything else."

Fred looked stricken. "I didn't think about it that way."

"Loving me isn't the same as managing this for me. I need you to be here. Not in charge of fixing what happened to me, because you can't, and every time you try, it makes even my own healing feel taken out of my hands."

"You're right," Fred said, finally. "I've been so angry on your behalf that I've been treating it like something I could solve with enough force. It's yours. All of it. Not mine."

"I need you to just be here. Steady. Not fixing. Just staying."

"I can do that," Fred said. "I promise."

And into the deeper she's sinking

I'm begging her please don't let go

There was a week late, not long after that you and Fred work things out, when you disappeared almost entirely — skipping meals, skipping the library, answering nothing, not even Luna's careful, persistent knocking in your door. It wasn't one single trigger. It was the accumulation of everything, finally too heavy to carry through another ordinary day — the anniversary of the party creeping closer on the calendar, a fresh round of whispers that had started up again for no reason and at the same time for being too close to fred, the exhausting, endless work of holding yourself together in front of people who'd decided, long ago, that you didn't deserve the effort.

Fred found you on the fourth day, curled in the farthest corner of an unused classroom, the one you'd once shared laughter in, now sitting in it alone in the dark.

"Hey," he said, quiet, not moving too fast, not crowding the doorway. "Angel, finally I have the privilege of seeing your face," he joked softly, then tentatively said "Can I come in?"

You didn't answer, just nod and he took that as permission, sitting down a careful distance away, close enough to be present, far enough to leave you room.

"You've been gone a few days," he said, gently. "I've been worried. Luna and the other ones have been worried. I'm not here to make you talk if you're not ready. I just — I needed to see you were alright. Or as alright as you can be today."

"I'm tired," you whispered, finally, voice hollow. "I'm so tired of holding all of it up. Some days I think it would just be easier to stop trying so hard to be okay. To just let myself sink, instead of fighting to stay afloat every single day."

Something in Fred's chest went cold and urgent at that, though he kept his voice steady, refusing to let his own fear show in a way that might frighten you further.

"Don't," he said, low, and it came out rawer than he meant it to, something close to pleading. "Please don't let go of this. Of any of it — of Luna, of me, of the people trying to hold on with you. I know it's exhausting. I know you're so tired of fighting a battle nobody else seems willing to fight alongside you. But I'm not asking you to be okay today. I'm just asking you not to disappear. There's a difference, and I need you to hear it." He approached and gently took your hands, caressing them in yours. "You don't have to be strong for one more single day. You just have to let us stay close enough to help carry some of this, instead of shutting the door and carrying it entirely alone."

Neither of you spoke for a while, letting the quiet settle into something less raw. Then Fred, apparently unable to stay serious for longer than strictly necessary, cleared his throat.

"You know," he said, thoughtfully, "if you really wanted to disappear properly, you should've picked a better hiding spot. This classroom's got terrible acoustics. I could hear you mising my jokes and or presence. Very unprofessional sulking, honestly. I'd give it a four out of ten."

"I wasn't sulking."

"Course not. You were doing advanced, silent brooding. Very different discipline. Requires years of training." He nudged your shoulder with his, gentle. "Next time, at least pick a classroom with better echo. I nearly walked into the wrong one twice looking for you. Gave Peeves a proper fright, actually, bursting in like that."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did. He called me 'overly dramatic,' which, from Peeves, is genuinely rich."

You're laughing at the absurdity of his joke, leaning forward; close enough now that the distance between you become charged, suspended, the kind of quiet neither of you rushed to break. Fred's hand came up, gentle, to brush something imaginary from your cheek, and for one long moment, his eyes dropped to your mouth and held there, and you felt yourself lean in, almost without deciding to.

Then some old, reflexive fear flickered across your face — nothing dramatic, just a half-second of hesitation, your body's old habit of bracing before your mind caught up to explain there was nothing to brace against.

Fred noticed immediately, and pulled back, gentle, unbothered.

"Hey, pretty girl, easy there yeah? We don't have to rush things—although I understand you're eager to taste this mouth ." He smiled and joke, easy, warm. "We'll kiss when you feel completely safe. I'm not going anywhere in the meantime don't worry; we'll have plenty of kisses when you really want them."

His body leaned down, kissing your forehead for a moment, a gesture that made tears sting behind your eyes.

You could have cried, a little, at how easily he let the moment go, how entirely unoffended he seemed by your own body's betrayal.

"Thank you," you said, quietly.

"Nothing to thank me for. I meant what I said. I'm patient, angel. More patient than I ever knew I had in me, if I'm honest, and I'm finding I quite like finding out."

As the moment faded and you gathered your things to go to your common room accompanied by Fred, he murmured something in your direction.

"I don't care what any of them think of you," he explained, noticing how you looked around, judging those who passed by. "Not one word of what they've decided. I only care about this —" He pointed his index finger at you and him. "about you still being here, tomorrow, and the day after, however slow that has to go. Don't let go, love. Whatever it takes. I'll be right here, holding on with you, for as long as you need me to."

You leaned into him, finally, silent tears slipping free, and he wrapped an arm around you without hesitation, and the two of you walk Until they arrived at your common room where Fred left you under some bad joke and the promise to see each other tomorrow that managed to make you smile.

It wasn't a fix. It was just a hand extended into the dark, and you took it, and that, that year, was enough to keep you from sinking any further.

She's got a bad reputation

But she's all that, all I want though,

Fred After that day he decided he was finally going to ask you out on a date and that made him lose his mind.

He found George and his girlfriend in the common room on a Tuesday evening, deposited himself directly across from them with the particular urgency of a man in genuine crisis.

"I need help. Both of you. Immediately."

George didn't even look up from his homework. "Let me guess."

"I want to ask her to go to Hogsmeade. And i have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and you two are apparently the resident experts on making a hopeless, terrified declaration of feelings work out, so."

George's girl bit back a laugh. "This feels remarkably familiar."

"Doesn't it just," George agreed, setting down his quill with theatrical patience. "Alright. What's the actual crisis?"

"Everything. Where do I take her. What do I say. Do I bring flowers, is that too much, is it not enough—"

"Merlin, listen to yourself!" George said, though not unkindly. "This is exactly what I sounded like a year ago. Word for word, practically."

"It's a bit unsettling, honestly," his girlfriend added, grinning. "Like watching a play I've already seen and with another version of the cast!"

"A less handsome version, right Sunshine? I'm your favorite twin," George asked his girlfriend with a lopsided, flirty smile.

"You're obviously my favorite twin, you idiot." She answered by rolling her eyes.

"You're both being extremely unhelpful." He complained, burying his face in his hands.

"Fine, fine." George relented, actually thinking about it now. "Something simple. Somewhere quiet. Show her you thought about it without making it a production she has to perform gratitude for. And for Merlin's sake, don't bring flowers you didn't pick yourself. Effort matters more than expense."

"I don't have the money for expense anyway."

"Even better. Use that!" The girl leaned forward. "Ask her real questions. Actually listen. Let her talk more than you do, which I know is a genuine struggle for you specifically, and fred—"

The redhead looked up from his agenda—where he was writing down all the advice.

"Don't scare her off, make her your girlfriend so I have a sister-in-law!" George joked, amused, watching his brother practically turn bright red.

Fred left the conversation only slightly less panicked than he'd arrived, but armed, at least, with something resembling a plan.

He found you the next afternoon in the library, and lost every scrap of the composure George had helped him rehearse within about four seconds of sitting down.

"Right. So. I've been thinking," Fred started, then stopped, then started again. "That is — I wanted to ask you something, and I've had this whole speech planned, and I've apparently forgotten every word of it, which is deeply embarrassing, so you'll just have to bear with me."

"That's an alarming opening."

"It's going somewhere, I promise." He dragged a hand through his hair, uncharacteristically flustered. "I wanted to know if you'd let me take you to Hogsmeade. Properly, I mean. An actual date, not just us wandering around like usual pretending it isn't one. I have some money saved up and i borrowed a bit from Mum, which I'm slightly ashamed of but not ashamed enough to not mention it, apparently — and I just. I'd like to take you somewhere nice, if you'd want that. No pressure at all if you don't. I just wanted to actually ask instead of hoping you'd assume."

You looked at him — flushed, rambling, entirely undone by his own nerves — and found something in your chest loosen at the sheer, earnest effort of it.

"I'd want that," you said, and watched relief and delight war for control of his whole face.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Brilliant." He grinned, wide and a little disbelieving. "Right. Good. I'm going to go tell George immediately, purely so he can stop asking me about it every four minutes."

The date itself was, for the first hour, exactly what he'd promised — easy, warm, ordinary in a way you were slowly learning to trust. He bought you a hot chocolate with the careful pride of someone spending money he'd genuinely worked for, made you laugh twice loud enough that people at nearby tables glanced over, walked close enough that your shoulders brushed the whole way down the high street.

He'd clearly planned it in more detail than he let on — steering you past Honeydukes because he remembered, from some offhand comment months earlier, that you preferred the sour sweets to the sweet ones; stopping at the stationer's because he'd noticed your sketchbook was nearly full and pretended, badly, that buying you a new one was an impulsive decision rather than the entire reason he'd suggested that particular street.

"You're not subtle," you told him, watching him fumble an explanation for why you absolutely needed a new sketchbook right that moment.

"I never claimed to be." He grinned, entirely unrepentant. "Subtlety's overrated. I'd rather you know exactly how much thought went into this."

"I forgot what this felt like," you admitted, a little later, threading your arm through his without quite deciding to. "Just being normal."

"Get used to it," Fred said. "I intend to keep giving you normal, boring, lovely afternoons for as long as you'll let me."

But Hogwarts was a small world.

As you were walking back toward the castle, the path narrowed near the Shrieking Shack. And there they were. The two Slytherins.

They blocked the path, smirking as they looked at you, then at Fred.

"Well, well," one of them sneered, looking you up and down with an expression that made you violently nauseous. "Looks like the pleasure hole found a Weasley! Tell me, Fred, are you just waiting for your turn? Because you don't have to buy her butterbeer for that. If you just want to see what she looks like under that coat, me and the lads still have the photographs from that night."

The world stopped.

The words landed like a physical blow. Shame rose fast and total, your whole body wanting to disappear.

Fred didn't shout. He didn't say a word. He dropped your hand. With a terrifying, deadly silence, Fred lunged.

He crossed the distance in two strides, the first punch connecting solid with Warrington's jaw, and then Higgs was on him too, chaos, fast and furious.

He tackled the boy to the snowy ground, his massive fist coming down with bone-shattering force across the other Slytherin jaw. Blood sprayed onto the snow.

The second boy reached for his wand, but before he could cast a hex, a blur of motion slammed into him from the side.

George, passing by with his girlfriend on his arm, took one look, sighed heavily, and waded directly into the fight beside his brother without a second's hesitation. George didn't need to ask questions. He joined the fray instantly.

The two Weasley twins were an unstoppable, brutal force of protective rage. They beat the two boys until they were bloody, bruised, and begging for mercy in the snow.

"Delete them," Fred said, breathing hard, voice low and dangerous. "Now. Every copy."

They deleted them, hands shaking, face covered in blood.

"Get on your knees," George snarled at the other one, kicking him down. "Apologize to her. Now."

The two boys, bleeding and terrified, crawled in the snow toward you, stammering out pathetic, fearful apologies.

You stood there, shaking violently. You should have felt vindicated. You should have felt relieved. But as you looked at the two boys cowering in the snow, you felt a massive, suffocating wave of anger. They weren't apologizing because they were sorry for destroying your life. They were apologizing because two bigger, stronger men had beaten them into submission.

You turned and ran all the way back to the castle, your mind a churning mess — grateful for Fred's fury, ashamed of the scene, moved by feelings you weren't ready to examine, and underneath it all, a harder, colder anger: that they'd only apologized because two much larger boys forced them to their knees, not because they'd ever once felt genuine remorse. The apology changed nothing, not really. It left you hollow rather than avenged.

And there was Luna; as always, at the right moment.

"I don't know what I'm feeling," you admitted. "Grateful, and furious, and humiliated, and something about Fred that terrifies me more than any of it. It's too much all at once."

She gently I take some blankets, wrap you up, and sit down next to you. Her wide, pale eyes were filled with a profound, ancient wisdom.

"You're think that you are angry at Fred for fighting," Luna said softly. "But you're really angry at yourself."

"I am weak, Luna," you sobbed, burying your face in your hands. "I am broken. I couldn't even defend myself. Fred had to do it. I'm just a victim. That's all I'll ever be."

"No," Luna said firmly. She reached out, tilting your chin up. "The problem isn't what happened to you. What happened was a tragedy, and it wasn't your fault. But the problem now, sister, is that you never allowed yourself to grieve. You let them build a cage of shame around you, and then you locked the door from the inside to stay safe."

Luna brushed a tear from your cheek. "Fred didn't fight them to save you. He fought them because he loves you. But only you can save yourself. You have to accept the pain, mourn the girl you used to be, and step out of the cage. You are so much stronger than the worst thing that ever happened to you."

Her words cracked the foundation of your trauma. You wept—not tears of panic, but tears of profound, shattering grief. You grieved the loss of your innocence. You grieved the pain. And slowly, the cage door swung open.

"Thank you," you said, once the worst of it had passed, voice raw. "For staying. That whole first night, and every night since. I don't think I ever properly thanked you for that."

"You don't have to thank a sister for loving you," Luna said, and the simplicity of it undid you all over again.

Nobody knows the way that I know her, said

Nobody knows the weight that's on her shoulders, said

Nobody knows the way that I know her, said

She got it bad, she got it bad

It was past midnight when you finally walked into the Gryffindor common room. Hermione had given you the password while ago.

The room was deserted, save for the dying embers of the fire. And Fred.

He was sitting on the rug, staring into the flames. His knuckles were bruised and bandaged. He looked up when he heard your footsteps, his brown eyes filled with an anxious, desperate hope. He immediately stood up, making sure not to crowd you.

"Angel," Fred whispered. "I'm sorry. I lost my temper. I couldn't hear him talk about you like that."

"I know," you said softly. You walked closer. You didn't stop at the safe three-foot perimeter. You walked right up to him, until you had to tilt your head back to look into his face. "I'm not mad at you, Fred. I was just... I was mourning. But I'm done hiding now."

Fred let out a shaky breath, his eyes tracing your features as if you were a miracle.

"Good," he murmured. A small, tentative version of his usual cocky grin touched his lips. He gestured to the quiet room. "Since we're both awake and you made a super brave decision, like the wonderful woman you are...we have to celebrate! care to dance?"

You laughed, a genuine, bright sound. "There's no music, Fred."

"I'll hum," he offered perfectly seriously.

He held out his hand. He didn't grab yours; he gave you the power to choose. Slowly, you placed your hand in his. His fingers were warm and rough. He pulled you gently closer, his other hand resting lightly on your waist.

You swayed together in the quiet, firelit room. Fred's humming was terrible, off-key, and wonderfully endearing. You laughed, resting your forehead against his chest. You could feel his heart hammering against his ribs.

An then you stopped swaying, looking up at him.

The firelight danced across his freckles. Fred stopped humming and looked down at your lips, his breathing shallow.

He clearly, desperately wanted to kiss you. The longing in his eyes was almost painful. But he stayed perfectly still, as if it was waiting for you.

He was giving you complete control over your own body.

You took a deep breath and let go of the fear.

You got up on your tiptoes, your hands sliding up his chest to wrap around his neck, and pressed your lips to his.

Fred let out a deep, ragged groan—a sound of absolute, starved devotion. His arms wrapped firmly around your waist, pulling you flush against him. He kissed you back with a gentleness that broke your heart and mended it all at once. It was a soft, perfect, completely safe kiss.

When you finally pulled back, both of you were breathless. Fred rested his forehead against yours, his eyes closed, a smile of pure, unadulterated joy spreading across his face.

"Be my girl, Angel," Fred whispered into the quiet room, his thumb gently stroking your cheek. "Let me be yours. I promise I'll always wait for you."

"I'm yours, Fred," you whispered back. "I'm right here."

For a moment, Fred simply stared at you, like he hadn't quite let the words land yet. Then, all at once, they did.

"YES!" He shouted it, loud enough that it echoed off the common room's stone walls, both fists thrown into the air as he spun in a full, delighted circle. "Merlin's beard — YES. Finally. Thank Merlin, thank Godric, thank whoever's listening—"

"Fred, it's past midnight—"

"I don't care! I have never cared less about anything in my entire life!" He grabbed you by the waist and spun you once, laughing, before setting you back down, slightly dizzy and laughing yourself despite every instinct telling you to shush him. "You said yes! You're my girlfriend! I'm going to go wake George up and tell him, actually, no — better idea — I'm going to tell the whole common room in the morning, very loudly, possibly with a banner—"

"Please don't make a banner."

"No promises." He was still grinning, entirely too pleased with himself, when he suddenly dropped to one knee in front of you with theatrical seriousness, taking both your hands in his. "Actually — wait. Before the banner. I have one request. One incredibly important, life-altering request."

"That's an ominous amount of buildup for a request."

"It's very important, I promise." His eyes were bright with mischief, though something more sincere sat underneath it. "Come to my match against Slytherin this weekend. Sit where I can see you. Cheer for me, embarrassingly loud, so the whole pitch knows exactly who my girlfriend is."

You hesitated, the old fear rising automatically — a crowd, all those eyes, the murmurs that would inevitably follow you to the stands. But something steadier rose up beneath the fear this time, something that had been growing in you for months now, patient and quiet and finally strong enough to answer back.

"Okay," you said, and watched his whole face light up like you'd handed him the sun.

You went. You sat in the stands with Luna on one side and Hermione on the other, and when the murmurs started — they always did — you felt the old urge to disappear, to make yourself small, to let the whispers win the way they always had.

You didn't.

Instead, halfway through the first half, you made a different decision entirely. You excused yourself from the stands, And you walked towards the section where the teachers were watching the game, with your heart hammering the whole way, and looked for Professor McGonagall.

"I need to tell you something," you said, when she approached you , voice steadier than you expected. "About last spring. About what actually happened, not the version everyone decided to believe."

You told her everything — carefully, in pieces, your voice cracking more than once, McGonagall listening without a single interruption, her expression growing sharper and more furious with every sentence. When you finished, she didn't offer empty comfort. She stood and pulled you into a brief, fierce hug that startled you both.

"Thank you for telling me," she said, quiet and utterly sincere. "I am so sorry it took this long for someone to properly ask. This will be investigated thoroughly, I promise you that. You have been remarkably brave, both in surviving this and in choosing to speak now. I want you to know that."

You returned to your place with your hands still shaking, but lighter than you'd felt in over a year — the specific, enormous relief of having finally, truly been heard.

Griffyndor win the match no long after, Fred was diving in a spectacular blur of scarlet and gold, and when he landed, he searched the stands immediately, found your face, and grinned so wide it looked like it might genuinely hurt.

The celebration that night in the common room was loud and chaotic in exactly the way Gryffindor common rooms were built for. Fred, still flushed from the match, climbed onto a table without warning, silencing the room with a piercing whistle.

"I have an announcement," he declared, entirely too pleased with himself. "This absolutely brilliant woman right here" — he pointed at you, and you felt your whole face go hot — "has agreed to be my girlfriend. I am the luckiest man in this castle. Possibly the luckiest man in Britain. I intend to be insufferable about it for the foreseeable future, so you should all prepare yourselves accordingly!"

The room erupted into cheers and good-natured groaning in equal measure, George whooping loudest of all, and you stood there in the middle of it, thoroughly embarrassed and thoroughly, undeniably happy, thinking that you couldn't remember the last time you'd let yourself be celebrated like this — loudly, publicly, without flinching once.

The weeks that followed were, by Fred's own cheerful admission, "a proper campaign of showing off."

He carried your bag whenever you'd let him, which was often, mostly because he made such a production of the martyrdom involved. He introduced you to strangers in corridors with unnecessary flourish — "this is my girlfriend, yes, the talented one, the one who draws" — until you started swatting his arm every time, which never once stopped him.

McGonagall's investigation moved faster than either of you expected. Within a month, the truth had been thoroughly, officially established — testimonies gathered, the timeline reconstructed, the photographs finally, properly accounted for and destroyed under supervision rather than simply threatened out of existence in a muddy street. Warrington and Higgs were expelled before the term's end, their names quietly, permanently removed from the school roster, the official record finally, belatedly matching the truth you'd been carrying alone for over a year.

The reaction, when it spread, was its own strange reckoning. Some people had the decency to look ashamed — the Ravenclaw prefect who'd warned Fred off you weeks earlier avoided your eyes entirely for a full month afterward. Others apologized outright, awkward and overdue, and you accepted what felt genuine and let the rest simply exist without your energy attached to it. A few, stubbornly, still doubted — clung to the story that had been easier to believe, unwilling to let a little thing like an official expulsion change their minds. You found, to your own surprise, that you'd made peace with that too. You couldn't force everyone to see the truth. You could only keep living it, loudly, in front of the people who mattered.

Fred, for his part, seemed to consider it a personal mission to make sure you never doubted, for even a moment, exactly how he saw you.

"You're staring again," you told him once, over breakfast, catching him watching you with unguarded, open adoration.

"I'm allowed, right? You're my girlfriend. I intend to stare as much as I like, and you let me, for the rest of my natural life." He stole a bite of your toast, grinning at your protest. "Get used to it, Angel. I've got a whole lot of staring saved up."

The summer sun beat down on the sprawling, chaotic garden of The Burrow.

You were sitting on a woven blanket under the shade of the apple orchard, a sketchbook balanced on your knees. You were wearing a light summer dress, your shoulders bare, the sun catching the healthy, golden glow of your skin. The shadows were gone. The heavy, oversized sweaters were packed away.

A few yards away, George and his girl were laughing as they tried to de-gnome a particularly stubborn patch of rosebushes. Harry and Ron were flying above the pitch.

Suddenly, a pair of large, warm hands covered your eyes from behind.

"Guess who," a low, rumbling voice murmured in your ear.

"The most irritating Beater in Great Britain?" you teased, leaning your head back against his chest.

Fred chuckled, dropping his hands and sliding down onto the blanket beside you. He wrapped an arm around your waist, pulling you tightly against his side. He pressed a kiss to your temple, looking down at the detailed sketch of a Niffler on your page.

"Beautiful," Fred said softly. He wasn't just talking about the drawing.

You leaned your head on his broad shoulder, closing your eyes and breathing in the scent of cinnamon and summer grass. You weren't entirely cured; some days were still hard, and some nights you still woke up panicking. But you weren't fighting alone anymore.

"Dinner's ready!" Molly Weasley called out from the back porch, wiping her hands on her apron, her eyes crinkling with joy as she looked at the two of you sitting under the tree.

Fred stood up, offering you his hand. You took it, letting him pull you to your feet. As you walked back toward the warm, noisy, beautiful chaos of the Weasley house hand-in-hand, you knew that your reputation didn't matter.

Nobody expected the Sorting Hat to shout "HUFFLEPUFF" for a girl with your bloodline.

George remembers hearing about it before he ever properly met you — the whispers in his first year, the way older purebloods had murmured that it was almost scandalous, a girl from a family like yours ending up anywhere but Slytherin. Blood like yours was supposed to go one way. It never occurred to any of them that a person could be too gentle for a house that prized ambition over kindness.

You were a sunbeam in a castle made of gray stone. The type of girl who carried extra vials of Pepperup Potion in your satchel during exam week just to hand them out to stressed first-years, regardless of their house. You were the one who thanked the house-elves by name whenever a fresh platter of pumpkin pasties appeared on the Great Hall tables.

George thought it made perfect sense. He'd decided that the first time he saw you, years before he ever spoke to you — third year, maybe, when you were just a small girl at the Hufflepuff table sneaking extra treacle tart to a first-year who'd been crying. You had this warmth to you that didn't fit anywhere near a dungeon. You were built for a house that valued loyalty over cunning, for common rooms with fireplaces instead of ambition.

He didn't think much else about it back then. You were just a girl two years below him, a name he half-knew, a face that smiled easily.

That was before Marcus Flint happened to you.

Nobody could say exactly when it started. There was no grand announcement, no obvious beginning — just, sometime around your third year, people started saying you were 'dating the Slytherin Quidditch bloke,' and it stuck, and nobody questioned it, because why would they? George didn't question it either, not at first. He just noticed, slowly, that the girl who used to laugh loud enough to be heard three tables away had gotten quieter. That your smiles had started looking rehearsed instead of real.

He spent more time than he'd ever admit trying to work out why.

I won't lie to you

I know he's just not right for you

You could still remember, if you let yourself, the version of you that had believed it might actually work.

Your parents told you about the arrangement when you were nine, in that cold room with too many candles, and you'd cried about it for exactly one night before deciding — with the particular stubborn optimism only a nine-year-old can manage — that you'd simply make the best of it. You didn't get a choice in whether. You could still, you told yourself, have some say in how.

So when you actually met Marcus properly, the summer before third year, you went looking for reasons to like him. And for a while, you found some. He could be charming when he wanted to be — funny, even, in a sharp-edged way, the kind of confident that felt like safety when you were fourteen and desperate for this to be survivable. He walked you around his family's grounds and pointed out constellations he probably didn't actually know the names of, and you laughed at his jokes, and let yourself believe, quietly, privately, that maybe this was what falling in love was supposed to feel like. Slow. Earned. Something you built together instead of something handed to you.

You told exactly no one about the contract. It was easier to let people believe you'd simply started dating, the way ordinary couples did — easier to pretend, even to yourself, that it was a choice rather than a sentence.

For a while, the pretending almost worked.

Then, slowly, in ways so small you couldn't point to any single moment as the turning point, he started closing doors you hadn't realized were open. He stopped asking what you thought. He started deciding things for you — where you'd sit, who you'd talk to, how long was too long to laugh with someone who wasn't him — and every time you tried to speak up about it, he made it feel like you were the one being difficult, the one making a simple arrangement complicated.

You learned to make yourself smaller. Quieter. You learned which topics led to arguments and avoided them entirely, learned which of your own opinions were safe to have out loud and which needed to stay folded up inside you where they couldn't cause trouble. Somewhere in that slow, patient erosion, the girl who used to laugh loud simply stopped existing in front of other people, replaced by someone careful, someone contained, someone who'd traded her whole self for the smallest possible chance of peace.

You didn't notice how much of yourself you'd given up until George Weasley sat down on a wobbly library bench and made you laugh before you'd even decided to let him.

It wasn't dramatic, the way it came back. It wasn't some single lightning-bolt moment. It was small, at first — a joke that startled a real laugh out of you before you could catch it, a boy who kept showing up in the gaps where you'd learned to expect no one. Piece by piece, without meaning to, George and Fred and the strange, loud, generous group gathering slowly around you began handing you back the parts of yourself you'd quietly packed away years before.

You didn't have a word for it yet, not really. You just knew that around them, you kept forgetting to be careful. And forgetting to be careful, you were starting to realize, felt a great deal like coming back to life.

And you can tell me if I'm off

But I see it on your face

When you say that he's the one that you want

George watched the Slytherin Quidditch trials from the top row of the stands, mostly out of boredom, partly because Fred had dared him to see if he could identify Slytherin’s flying weaknesses before the match against them.

You were there too, a few rows down, wrapped in a scarf that wasn't even green — small rebellion, George thought, and he liked you a little more for it.

He watched Flint didn't offer you a hand to help you up from the frozen wood. He didn't ask if you were cold. He simply unstrapped his heavy, mud-splattered leather arm-guards and dropped them directly into your lap with a dull thud. You flinched slightly at the weight, gathering the filthy leather against your clean yellow cloak as you stood up to follow him. George felt something ugly twist in his stomach that he didn't examine too closely.

If I were her boyfriend, he thought, leaning back against the stand rail, I'd have landed that broom and come straight for her instead of doing a victory lap for people who don't even like me.

If I were her boyfriend, I'd have noticed she brought a book to read because she gets bored watching drills, and I'd have asked her about it instead of assuming she was there just to watch me.

If I were her boyfriend—

"You're doing the thing again," Fred said from beside him, not even looking up from the notes he was scribbling about Flint's blocking technique.

"What thing."

"The thing where you plan out an entire relationship with a girl who doesn't know you exist yet."

"She knows I exist. I sit two tables away from her at every meal."

"Knowing your face and knowing you're constructing an entire fantasy boyfriend future around her are different things, mate."

George didn't argue, because Fred wasn't wrong, and there wasn't much point pretending otherwise with the one person who could always tell.

And you're spending all your time

In this wrong situation

And anytime you want it to stop

The first time George noticed the bruise, he hadn't spoken a single word to you yet.

It was small — the kind of thing most people wouldn't clock at all — a faint shadow along your upper arm, half-hidden by your sleeve, visible only because you'd reached up to return a book to a high shelf in the library and the fabric had shifted. George happened to be two tables away, ostensibly revising for a Charms test he had no intention of passing, and he went very still.

You didn't wince. You didn't even seem to notice him noticing. You just tugged your sleeve back down, automatic, practiced, like covering it was a reflex you'd built a long time ago.

George sat there for a full ten minutes after you'd gone, hands clenched under the table, something cold and furious settling into his chest that didn't fully leave him for weeks.

He hasn't introduced to you properly yet. He didn't know a single true thing about your life; your family, the contract nobody had told him existed. All he knew was a bruise on a girl's arm and the particular, practiced way she'd hidden it, and it was enough to make something in him go quiet and hard in a way it rarely did.

Whatever bloke did that, George thought, isn't a man. Full stop. There's no version of that sentence that ends any other way. A man doesn't put his hands on a girl. Ever. For any reason.

He didn't know yet that it was Flint. He found out three days later, from an offhand comment by one of the Slytherin Chasers in the corridor — something about Flint being "in a mood since his girl mouthed off at him and he take care of it" — and the pieces slid together with a sickening click.

George didn't do anything about it that week. There was nothing yet to do, no opening, no excuse that wouldn't out you both in ways neither of you were ready for. But two weeks later, Gryffindor played Slytherin, and George — who took his job as Beater seriously in a way he rarely admitted out loud — hit a Bludger dead into Marcus Flint's ribs so hard the crack was audible from the top stands.

"Foul!" the Slytherin Captain howled, and Madam Hooch blew her whistle, and George raised both hands in perfectly innocent confusion.

"He flew right into the trajectory," George said, all wide-eyed and reasonable. "I can't help where the man decides to put his own body, you know?”

Nobody could prove otherwise. Flint spent the rest of that match wincing every time he turned too fast, and George, soaring past him at one point, leaned in just close enough to be heard over the wind.

"Careful," George said, pleasant as anything. "I wouldn't want you to put me in a mood by mouthing off at me and having to take care of it"

Flint didn't understand the warning yet — not really, not fully.

It wasn't proportionate. It wasn't even close to proportionate, one bruise for one bludger. But it was the only currency George had access to at the time, and he spent it without a flicker of guilt.

After that, he started watching more closely, and the more closely he watched, the worse it got.

He watched Flint walk straight past you in a crowded corridor without so much as a glance, deep in conversation with a pair of seventh-year Slytherin girls, one of whom laughed at something he'd said with her hand lingering a beat too long on his arm. You'd been three steps behind him the entire time, carrying a stack of books he hadn't offered to help with, and you didn't say a word about any of it — just adjusted your grip and kept walking, like it was simply weather to be endured.

He watched him, another time, at a table near the greenhouses, laughing loudly at some Ravenclaw girl's joke while you sat beside him in total silence, present in body only, your attention drifting somewhere far away from the conversation you'd been excluded from entirely. Nobody at that table addressed you once in twenty minutes. George counted, from where he sat pretending to revise two tables over, too furious to actually read a single word of his own notes.

He watched him forget dates near-miss twice in one week, waving off your gentle reminder about a Hogsmeade plan he'd suggested himself, calling you 'dramatic' when you pointed out he'd forgotten, like remembering things about you was an unreasonable request rather than the bare minimum anyone should expect.

"He didn't even apologize," George told Fred that night, pacing instead of sitting, too wound up to stay still. "Just called her dramatic and walked off to go flirt with someone else. Like she's furniture that occasionally has feelings he finds inconvenient."

"You've got to stop keeping score if it's going to do this to you every time," Fred said, not unkindly.

"I can't stop. That's the problem. I see it and it just — sits in me, all day, every time, and I don't know what to do with it except get angrier." George dropped onto his bed, dragging both hands down his face. "The worst part is she doesn't even react! Like she's stopped expecting anything else. That's what he's done to her — not just the unkindness itself, but training her to expect nothing better, so it doesn't even register as unkindness to her anymore. Just Tuesday."

"So do something about it."

"I am doing something about it," George said. "I will show up for her, It's not dramatic, it's not going to fix it overnight, but it's the only thing I've got that doesn't make it worse. I can't drag her away from him. I can't make the choice for her. All I can do is make sure that when she's ready to notice there's another option—that I can treat her better!, and I'm still standing right there, having not given up."

Fred didn't have a clever response to that. He just nodded, and let his brother sit with his own frustration a while longer, because some things didn't have a joke that fixed them.

I know I can treat you better

Than he can

The first time he actually spoke to you, it wasn't smooth, and it wasn't planned, and he liked to think about that later as proof it was real — not some scheme, not a line, just him showing up in a hallway because he saw you sitting on the floor outside an empty classroom, knees pulled up, staring at nothing.

"You're blocking the good bench," he said, nodding at the bench nobody ever used because it wobbled, sitting down next to you before you could tell him not to.

"There's no one else here."

"I know. It's still the good bench. Principle of the thing."

You almost smiled. Almost.

"You're George," you said. Not a question.

"I'm offended you had to specify. Most people just guess and get it wrong fifty percent of the time."

"Fred's got a scar over his eyebrow. You don't."

"You've been paying attention."

"You're both loud. It's hard not to."

George grinned, delighted despite himself. "So you have noticed me."

"I notice most things," you said, and something in the way you said it made him think you meant it as a small, sad confession rather than a flirtation. "I'm just quiet about what I notice."

He filed that away. He'd learn later how true it was — that you saw everything, everyone, every unkindness and every small cruelty happening around you, and said nothing about any of it, least of all the ones happening to you.

"Well," George said, standing back up, offering you a hand you didn't take. "For the record — whatever you're doing sitting on cold floors outside empty classrooms looking like that — I'd rather be doing something else with you. Just so it's on file."

You blinked at him. "On file for what?"

"For whenever you get tired of the current idiot you're with," he said, easy, light, like it cost him nothing to say, though it very much did. "I'll be around."

He left before you could answer, because he'd learned enough about you in five minutes to know that pushing you into a response you weren't ready for would only make you retreat further.

And any girl like you deserves a gentleman

After that, George made a habit of it — showing up, small and unannounced, in the gaps where you were otherwise alone.

He was, by his own admission, absolutely shameless about it.

"You've got flour on your nose, by the way," he told you once after breakfast, entirely unprompted, when you very much did not have flour on your nose. You touched your face anyway, and he grinned like he'd won something. "Made you check! That's the whole trick."

"That was a lie."

"It was a bit you didn't know you needed."

Another time, passing you in the corridor between classes, he fell into step beside you without asking. "Walk you to Herbology?"

"I'm going the other way."

"I know. I'll walk you the wrong way, then. Very gallant of me."

You laughed — actually laughed, quick and surprised, like it had escaped before you could stop it — and George filed that sound away too, added it to the small, growing collection of things about you he refused to forget.

He wasn't subtle about the flirting, either, not really. It wasn't the kind of flirting designed to trap you or corner you into anything — it was lighter than that, easier, an open hand rather than a closed one.

"You know," he said once, walking you partway to a class neither of them needed him for, "if I ever got the chance, I'd tell you you're the best-looking girl in this castle at least twice a day. Purely as public information. People deserve to be informed."

"George."

"I'm not saying anything you don't already know."

"I don't, actually."

That stopped him for a second — the genuine surprise in your voice, like the idea had never once occurred to you as true. George filed that away too, uglier and more useful than the rest: proof of exactly how little you'd been told, and by exactly whom.

He started turning up in small ways after that, ways that had nothing to do with flirting and everything to do with simply being there.

When Flint stood you up one afternoon — some excuse about practice running long, though you both suspected it was just carelessness — George appeared five minutes later, hands in his pockets, entirely too casual to be a coincidence.

"Fancy seeing you here," he said, like he hadn't clearly been watching the entrance from somewhere out of sight, waiting to see if you'd need someone.

"Were you following me?"

"I was passing. Extremely coincidentally. In the general direction of where I have no classes in." He fell into step beside you anyway. "Walk you back up?"

He carried your books whenever he had half an excuse to, sliding them out from under your arm without asking, grumbling theatrically about the weight of a single textbook like it was a physical trial. He learned your schedule without ever admitting he'd learned it, appearing at the end of corridors at exactly the right moments, always with some flimsy excuse for why he happened to be there.

Tell me why are we wasting time

On all your wasted crying

When you should be with me instead?

He didn't have much to give you, not compared to what your family or Flint's could offer — no expensive trinkets, no grand gestures, no vaults of gold behind the gifts. What he had was attention, and a talent for turning very small things into things that mattered.

One random day, he gave you a single Sneezewort blossom, nicked from Greenhouse Three, wrapped clumsily in a torn page of his own Charms notes.

"I know it's not much," he said, suddenly a little unsure of himself, which was rare enough that you noticed. "Haven't got the kind of money that buys the fancy stuff. Figured you'd rather have something someone actually thought about than something someone just bought, though."

You kept that flower pressed inside a book for the rest of the year, and never told him so, though he probably knew.

I know I can treat you better

Better than he can

He started keeping a private, furious tally — not of Flint's cruelties this time, but of every ordinary kindness he'd give you if he ever got the chance, said mostly to Fred, mostly late at night, mostly with more heat than either of them expected.

"How does that idiot have a girl like that?" George said one night, staring at the dormitory ceiling, voice low and hard in the dark. "She's probably the most beautiful girl in this entire school, Fred, and he just — looks at anyone else! Ravenclaw girls, seventh-year Slytherins, doesn't matter who, so long as it isn't her."

"George—"

"If it were me," George went on, like he hadn't heard him, "I'd make sure she knew she was beautiful every single day. I wouldn't want to look at anyone else. Not once. Not for a second. I don't understand how you have her and just — don't look at her."

Fred didn't say anything for a while.

"You're properly gone on her, aren't you," he said eventually, quiet, no teasing left in it.

"Yeah," George said, to the ceiling, to the dark, to nobody but himself, really. "Yeah, I think I properly am."

He got a fuller measure of exactly what he was up against a week later, in the corridor outside the Charms classroom, when he came around the corner in time to hear Flint's voice, low and cutting, aimed at you while a small cluster of his friends looked on.

"You embarrassed me at breakfast," Flint was saying, close to your ear in that way that looked almost intimate to anyone not paying attention, though George had learned by now exactly what it actually was. "Correcting me in front of people. Do that again and see what happens."

"I only said the date was wrong, Marcus, it wasn't even—"

"I don't care if you were right. You don't correct me. Ever. It makes you look like you think you're clever, and it makes me look like I can't control my own girlfriend, and neither of those things is acceptable." His mouth curled, ugly and dismissive. "Honestly, sometimes I don't know why I bother. You're lucky I bother at all, given what you bring to this."

George's hands had curled into fists before he'd even decided to move, and it took every ounce of restraint he had left not to close the distance between them right there in the corridor. But George forced himself to stay where he was, jaw tight, watching you nod along to something that should never have needed an apology in the first place.

He found you an hour later, alone by the lake, and didn't say anything about what he'd overheard, not directly. He just sat down beside you, close enough to be a presence without crowding you, and waited.

"You heard that," you said eventually, not a question.

"I heard that."

"I'm sorry you had to."

"Don't," George said, quiet but firm. "Don't apologize for what he said. You didn't do anything wrong. You corrected a wrong date. That's not a crime, that's just — being right." He exhaled, some of the tightness easing out of his shoulders now that it was just the two of you. "I hate watching this. I want you to know that. Not because I think less of you for staying — I don't, not for a second — but because every time I see it, I have to fight the urge to do something considerably less clever than talking to you."

"I know."

"I'm not saying it to guilt you. I promise. I just—" He looked out at the water instead of at you, giving the words somewhere else to land. "I just wish, every single day, that you could see yourself the way I see you. Because from where I'm sitting, you're the best person in this whole castle, and it costs me something every time I watch someone treat you like you're lucky to be tolerated."

You didn't answer that right away. But you leaned, just slightly, until your shoulder rested against his, and he let the silence hold both of you for a long while, content just to be near you, even when there was nothing left to say that would fix any of it.

I'll stop time for you

The second you say you'd like me too

He channeled some of that fury into more productive outlets. Flint's Quidditch gloves turned a violent, unremovable shade of pink two days before a match, for reasons the coach never did work out. His broom polish mysteriously stopped working the same week, leaving his Nimbus dull and streaky no matter how hard his teammates scrubbed it. George never claimed responsibility, and never denied it either, and simply wore the smallest, most satisfied smile every time Flint complained loudly about it.

"You didn't," you said to him once, biting back a laugh, having pieced it together same as everyone else eventually did.

"Didn't what?"

"George."

"I have no idea what you're referring to. I'm simply a bystander who happens to find the whole thing very funny."

I just wanna give you the loving that you're missing

Baby, just to wake up with you

Would be everything I need and this could be so different

Tell me what you want to do

The Burrow at Christmas was loud in the particular way it always was — Fred and George's latest invention setting off intermittent small explosions in the shed, Ginny and Ron arguing over the last of the good chocolate, Molly moving through the kitchen like a small, determined hurricane, refusing anyone's help and complaining the entire time that nobody ever helped her.

George found himself, more than once that holiday, standing at the kitchen window doing absolutely nothing useful, staring out at the snow-covered garden without actually seeing it.

Molly noticed. Molly always noticed.

"You've gone quiet on me," she said, on the third day, catching him alone while she peeled potatoes at a pace that made the knife nothing but a blur. "That's not like you. Fred's been complaining you're no fun to prank people with this week. Says your heart's not in it."

"My heart's fine."

"George."

He sighed, dropped into the chair across from her, picked up a potato he had no intention of peeling properly. "There's a girl."

"I gathered that much from the letters. Ginny mentions her these days." Molly didn't look up from her peeling, giving him the kind of space that made it easier to talk, the way she always did. "Tell me about her, then. Properly. Not just that she's pretty, I assume you've covered that part yourself plenty."

George turned the potato over in his hands, trying to find the right place to start.

"She's kind," he said finally. "Properly kind, not the performing kind some people do because it looks good. She remembers the names of house-elves. She used to sit with first-years crying about homesick letters and just — stay, until they felt better, not because anyone was watching. She notices when other people are struggling before they've said a word about it."

"That's a good start."

"She's funny, too, when she lets herself be. Dry, unexpected — the kind of funny that sneaks up on you because she doesn't perform it, she just says the truest thing in the room and it happens to also be hilarious." George found himself smiling without meaning to. "And she's brave in a way she doesn't seem to know about yet. Properly brave. Not the loud kind. The kind where you keep getting back up after something's tried to grind you down for years, and you don't even seem to realize that's what bravery looks like."

Molly set down her knife.

"She sounds like someone worth losing your heart to," she said, gently.

"She's with someone else," George said, and the words came out heavier than he meant them to. "Has been for years.I think something isn’t right with him, though she's never said as much — just something about it doesn't sit right, the way she talks about him, the way she goes quiet whenever his name comes up. He's not good to her, Mum. Not even a little. And she stays anyway, and I don't understand it, and it's driving me half out of my mind watching it happen."

"Have you told her any of this? How you feel?"

"Bits of it. Not all of it. I don't want to be one more person pushing her toward a decision she has to make on her own terms, in her own time. I just—" George exhaled, frustrated with himself. "I just want her to know there's somewhere else to go, if she ever decides she wants to go there. I don't need her to choose me right this second. I just need her to know the door's open."

Molly reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, flour and all.

"That," she said, "is exactly the kind of love worth having, George Weasley. The patient kind. The kind that doesn't demand anything back before it's ready to be given." She squeezed his hand once, then picked her knife back up, businesslike again, though her eyes stayed soft. "You bring her round sometime, if she ever wants to come. This house has room for anyone who needs it. You know that."

"I know."

"Good." Molly nodded, satisfied, already moving on to the next potato. "Now go help your brother before that shed catches fire properly. I can hear him plotting something reckless from here."

George left the kitchen lighter than he'd entered it, though the ache of missing you — actually missing you, a whole two weeks of not hearing your laugh or watching you making those little faces of disagreement when Flint or someone else said stupid things you didn't agree with — hadn't gotten any smaller. If anything, saying it all out loud to his mother had only made it more real: that whatever this was, it wasn't some passing thing he'd talk himself out of by. He was properly, hopelessly gone on you, and he didn't especially want to be talked out of it even if he could.

He wrote you a letter that night, longer than he meant it to be, and tore up the first three drafts because they all sounded too much like things he wasn't ready to say yet. The one he finally sent just told you about the exploding shed, and asked if the elves had let you help with the holiday baking of your house, and signed off, simply, 'missing your terrible taste in jokes. — G.’

You wrote back within the week, and George read the letter four times before he let himself put it down.

Cause I know I can treat you better than he can

And any girl like you deserves a gentleman

The Slytherin party that spring was exactly the kind of event you'd learned to dread — too many people to impress, too many careful conversations you had to stand quietly beside without contributing to. Flint had brought you as an accessory, the way he always did, introduced you to exactly two people before abandoning you near the refreshments to go network with a group of seventh-years who could supposedly help his father's business.

You watched him laugh too loud at something a Ravenclaw girl said, one hand braced against the wall beside her in a way that had nothing platonic about it, and you felt the familiar, tired resignation settle over you — the specific exhaustion of being technically accompanied and entirely alone at the same time.

"This seat taken?"

You turned to find George, looking entirely too comfortable for someone who definitely hadn't been invited, holding two glasses of something sparkling and passing you one without asking if you wanted it.

"How did you even get in here?"

"Fred's very convincing when he wants to be. Also I may have told the door it was very important I deliver a message." He dropped into the seat next to you, glancing pointedly toward where Flint still stood far too close to the Ravenclaw girl. "Charming. He does know you're still in the room, doesn't he?"

"He gets caught up," you said, automatic, the excuse worn smooth from years of practice. "It's not personal. He's just—"

"If I were your boyfriend," George said, easy, conversational, like he was commenting on the weather rather than saying something that made your chest go tight, "I wouldn't leave you alone at a party for longer than it takes to get you a drink. I definitely wouldn't leave you alone at a party to go stand two inches from someone else's face."

"George."

"I'm just saying. Purely hypothetically. If I were the one who got to bring you somewhere, I don't think I'd manage to look at anything else in the room the entire night."

You laughed, a little unsteady while your cheeks blushed slightly, and reached for something to say that would put the conversation back on familiar ground. "He's under a lot of pressure. His father expects things from him."

"Doesn't mean he gets to leave you standing by like a coat rack."

You opened your mouth to defend Flint again — the reflex was so old, so automatic, that the words were halfway out before you registered you didn't actually believe them anymore. You closed your mouth instead.

Across the room, Flint had noticed you weren't alone anymore. He didn't come over — didn't want the scene, not here, not in front of people whose opinions mattered to his father — but he caught your eye once, just long enough to mouth something ugly your way: ‘pathetic’, ‘Mudblood’ and then, a beat later, ‘desperate’, like watching you laugh with someone else was proof of some failing in you rather than in him. You looked away first, the old shame rising automatic and fast, before you made yourself look back at George instead.

You didn't want to pay attention to Marcus, not now. You'd deal with the consequences later.

George noticed. He always noticed.

"You don't have to do that," he said, gentler now. "The explaining-him-away thing. Not with me."

"Old habit," you admitted, quiet.

"Well. I'm happy to help you break it." He bumped his shoulder against yours, nodded toward the little band playing somewhere across the room. "Dance with me instead of arguing about him."

"George, I can't, he'll—"

"He's still over there," George said, glancing over, "very invested in whatever he's saying to someone who isn't you. I don't think he'll notice one dance."

You should have said no. You knew, somewhere underneath the part of you that was already standing, already letting him take your hand, that this was exactly the kind of small rebellion that could cost you later. But George was looking at you like you were the only interesting thing in the entire room, and it had been so long since anyone had looked at you like that, and you found you didn't actually want to say no.

You danced badly, both of you, laughing more than you moved with any real rhythm, and for the length of one song, you forgot entirely to watch the door for Flint.

It was somewhere in the middle of that dance, spinning clumsily under George's arm with your own laugh still ringing in your ears, that you understood something you'd been quietly avoiding understanding for weeks.

You liked him. Not the careful, hopeful way you'd once tried to like Marcus, building affection out of nothing because you needed it to be there. This was different — easier, and truer, and entirely involuntary. George made you laugh without trying. George noticed the smallest things about you and remembered them. George looked at you like your presence in a room was a good thing rather than an obligation to be managed.

You realized, with something between panic and relief, that you were falling for him — not because you'd decided to, not because it was convenient or arranged or the sensible thing to do, but because for the first time in years, someone was giving you, freely and without being asked, exactly what you'd always hoped Marcus might eventually give you and never had. It hadn't grown out of desperation this time. It had grown out of nothing but George simply, consistently, showing up.

You didn't say any of that out loud. But you didn't let go of his hand right away either, even after the song ended, and George didn't seem to mind that at all.

Tell me, why are we wasting time on all your wasted cryin'

When you should be with me instead?

I know I can treat you better, better than he can

Fred cornered him about it two days later, in the empty dormitory, with none of his usual joking around the edges of it.

"I need to say something, and I need you to actually hear it instead of making a joke to get out of hearing it."

George, halfway through pulling on a jumper, paused. "That's an ominous opening."

"I'm serious, George." Fred sat down heavily on the end of his own bed, facing him properly. "I watched you at that party. I've watched you all year, actually, going quietly out of your mind over a girl who — and I say this because I love you, and because somebody has to — keeps choosing to go back to him. Every time. Every single time something happens, every time he does something rotten, she goes back. And you keep showing up anyway, keep hoping, keep getting your heart handed back to you in pieces, and I don't understand why you keep doing that to yourself."

George didn't answer right away. He sat down on his own bed, across from his brother, and let the question actually land instead of deflecting it the way he usually would.

"She's not choosing him," George said finally, quiet. "That's the thing you're not seeing, Fred. It's not a choice, not really — not the kind where she's weighing him against me and picking him. There's something underneath all of it I don't fully understand yet, something that isn't about wanting him at all. I don't think she's ever once gotten to choose anything in her whole life. Not really. Not where it counts."

"That doesn't mean it's your job to wait around for her to figure that out."

"Maybe it isn't," George admitted. "Maybe you're right, and I'm an idiot, and I should cut my losses and find some nice girl who's actually available to be chosen. But I don't want to, Fred. That's the honest answer. I don't want to stop, even knowing it might not go anywhere, because the alternative is watching her disappear into whatever that bloke's turning her into and doing nothing about it, and I can't do that. I'd rather love her without getting anything back than not love her at all and pretend that was ever a real option for me."

Fred studied him for a long moment, something shifting in his expression — the confusing anger gone entirely now, replaced with something gentler.

"You really do love her," he said. "Not just fancy her. Actually love her."

"Yeah," George said, and it didn't feel strange to say it out loud anymore, not the way it had months ago in the dark. "Yeah, I do."

"Well." Fred exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair. "Then I suppose I'll stop asking you to give it up. But I'm not going to stop worrying about you either. That's the deal. You get to be a lovesick idiot, and I get to be the brother who worries about the lovesick idiot."

"Fair trade."

"And if it doesn't work out—"

"Fred."

"I'm just saying, if it doesn't—"

"It's going to work out," George said, with more certainty than he probably had any right to. "I don't know when. I don't know how. But I'm not giving up on her just because it's taking longer than I'd like. She's worth the wait. She's worth all of it."

Fred didn't argue with that. He just reached over and shoved George's shoulder, the closest thing to affection either of them ever bothered translating into words, and let the subject drop.

Give me a sign, take my hand, we'll be fine

Promise, I won't let you down

He found you in the kitchens on a Tuesday near midnight, which was not where he expected to find anyone, seeing as he'd only gone down there himself in search of an illicit snack.

You were flour to the elbow, laughing — actually laughing, the loud unguarded kind George hadn't heard from you in the normal days— while a small elf named Tibby directed you on folding something delicate into the morning's pastry batter.

"You're supposed to be asleep," George said, leaning in the doorway.

You startled, then relaxed when you saw it was him. "You're supposed to be asleep too."

"I'm never asleep. Ask anyone. It's part of my mystique." He wandered over, peering at the tray of half-finished pastries. "What's the occasion?"

"No occasion. I just like it down here." You handed him a warm roll without being asked, like it was obvious he'd want one, and something about that small automatic generosity — offering before he could even ask — hit George somewhere soft. "The elves let me help sometimes. Nobody minds if I get flour everywhere down here. Nobody expects anything from me down here."

"I'd expect things from you," George said, mouth full of stolen roll. "I'd expect you to make me one of those every week, for starters."

"That's not the kind of expectation I meant."

"I know," he said, quieter now. "That's sort of the point I was making. Down here, up there, wherever — nobody should be expecting you to be anything other than exactly what you already are."

You looked at him for a long moment, flour on your cheek, something unreadable in your face, and George thought — not for the first time — that he would very much like to be the person who got to see that unguarded version of you every single day, and not just on stolen Tuesday midnights in a kitchen full of elves.

It happened first in Charms, of all places — Professor Flitwick pairing you with Ron for a practical, and somewhere between the two of you failing spectacularly at the same charm four times running, you'd started laughing, properly, helplessly, at Ron's increasingly dramatic hand gestures.

"I'm doing exactly what the book says!"

"You're doing an interpretive dance, is what you're doing."

"It's a technique—"

By the end of the lesson, Harry and Hermione had drifted over too, drawn by the noise, and the four of you left the classroom together still laughing about it, and for one full hour, walking down the corridor surrounded by people who wanted nothing from you except your company, you forgot entirely to feel small.

After that, in the Gryffindor common room Ron was who said out loud what everyone was thinking about you.

"It's mental, is what it is," Ron announced, apropos of nothing, while Ginny looked up from her Charms essay and Harry, and Fred, and Hermione glanced over from the next sofa. "A girl that sweet, and she doesn't have a single proper mate to her name. Just trails around after Flint's lot like she's an accessory."

"She's got Hufflepuff friends," Ginny pointed out.

"Does she, though?" Fred said, tilting his

head. "I've never actually seen her sit with them at meals. She's always at the Slytherin table, or alone."

"I talked to her today," Hermione offered. "She's lovely. Genuinely lovely. I don't understand why she doesn't have more people around her."

"Because she spends every waking hour orbiting a bloke who barely acknowledges she's there," George said, sharper than he meant to.

The room went a little quiet at that. Harry looked between George and Fred with the particular expression he wore when he was piecing something together.

"You fancy her," Harry said. Not a question either — apparently that was just how people talked to George these days.

"I think she deserves better than what she's getting," George said, which wasn't a denial, and everyone in the room knew it wasn't.

"Well," Hermione said, decisive in the way she got about injustices large and small, "From now on we'll help her get out of there, give her more perspective!. It's ridiculous that she doesn't have anyone."

That was how it started properly — not George's doing, not really, though he'd take the credit forever after. It was Hermione, cornering you after a class to ask if you wanted to study together. It was Ron, of all people, offering you his notes—the one that he steal from hermione—when you missed a class. It was small, easy inclusion, offered without conditions, the exact opposite of everything Flint had ever given you.

By the time winter came around, you'd become something like a fixture at the edge of their group — not entirely one of them yet, but no longer entirely alone either. Like a careful habit, avoiding letting Marcus see you happy for too long.

Hermione was seeking you out in the library some evenings, ostensibly to compare Arithmancy notes, though the conversation always drifted somewhere more honest than homework. It was Hermione, in fact, who first noticed the way you apologized for things that weren't your fault, the reflexive sorry that crept into sentences that didn't need one.

"You don't have to do that, you know," Hermione said one evening, gently, after you'd apologized for asking her to repeat something. "Apologize for existing. You're allowed to just — take up the space you're already taking up."

"Old habit," you said, the same phrase you kept reaching for, the one that covered so much you didn't want to examine too closely.

"Well, I'd like to help you break it, if you'll let me." Hermione said it plainly, without any performance of pity, which was somehow what made it land. "You're cleverer than you give yourself credit for. I've seen your work. You talk yourself down constantly, and I don't understand why, because you don't have anything to talk yourself down about.

Ron, unexpectedly, taught you something else entirely — the easy, careless confidence of simply saying what you thought without rehearsing it first. He argued with you about Quidditch strategy one afternoon with the same blunt enthusiasm he argued with everyone, no careful edges, no walking on eggshells, and you found yourself arguing back just as bluntly before you'd even decided to let yourself.

"You're wrong, though," you told him, flatly, about some point regarding Chaser formations, and the words came out before you could soften them the way you'd learned to soften everything.

Ron blinked, then grinned, delighted rather than offended. "See, that's what I like about you. Most people just agree with me to end the discussion . Took you long enough to stop doing that."

It was Harry who said the quietest, truest thing, one time by the fire when the common room had mostly emptied out and it was just the two of you and a fire burning low.

"I used to think I didn't deserve the Weasleys, you know," Harry said, apropos of nothing, watching the flames rather than you. "Growing up the way I did — being told, one way or another, that I was a burden, that I should be grateful for scraps, that wanting more than that made me difficult. Took me a long time to understand that wasn't true. That I was allowed to want an actual family, not just tolerance."

You went very still, hearing something in that you recognized too well.

"I'm not saying I know you or your situation," Harry added, glancing over. "I don't, not really. But I know what it looks like, a person who's convinced themselves that being tolerated is the most they're allowed to want. And I just — I wanted you to know it's not true. Whatever's telling you that, it's lying."

You didn't have an answer for that, not right away. But you thought about it for days afterward, and something in you — something small and stubborn that had been buried a long time — started, very slowly, to believe him.

The first time you actually tested that belief, it was small, almost nothing: Flint, dismissing an opinion you'd offered about which restaurant to visit over a Hogsmeade weekend, waving you off with barely a glance. And instead of letting it go the way you always had, you heard yourself say, quietly but clearly, "I'd still like to go to the one I mentioned, actually.” He looked at you like you'd grown a second head. You didn't take it back.

It wasn't a large moment. Nobody but you would have even noticed it as one. But it was the first time in years you'd said what you wanted out loud and let the sentence stand, unretracted, and something about that small, stubborn insistence felt like the first real crack in a wall you'd spent years building around yourself.

The changing rooms incident was, George would insist for years afterward, not his fault.

You'd gone looking for Harry Potter to return a book, and someone had told you he was in the Gryffindor changing rooms after practice, and you hadn't thought twice before pushing the door open — because it was Harry you were looking for, and Harry you expected, and not, as it turned out, George, mid-way through pulling his shirt back on, very much not finished doing so.

You froze in the doorway. George, to his credit, did not.

He just stood there, shirt still hanging open, and let one corner of his mouth curl up, slow and entirely too pleased with himself.

"Like the view, love?"

"I— sorry, I was looking for Harry, I didn't— I'm so sorry—" You were already backing out, face burning, words tripping over each other in a way George found completely, unfairly charming.

"No need to apologize. I don't mind an audience."

"George!"

"I'm only saying! You're allowed to look, This view is just for y—"

But you'd already gone, the door swinging shut behind you, and George stood there a moment longer, grinning at absolutely nobody, thoroughly delighted with how flustered you'd been, and even more delighted by the fact that you hadn't looked away half as fast as you probably should have.

He brought it up for weeks afterward, at the worst possible moments, purely to watch you go red.

"You know," he'd say, entirely out of nowhere, over breakfast, "if you ever want a repeat viewing, I'm generally in the changing rooms after tuesday practice."

"I will never speak of that again."

"That's fine. I'll keep speaking of it for the both of us."

Your new hapiness didn't last. Flint found out — someone always told him things, eventually, some Slytherin eager to stay in his good books — and he cornered you outside the Great Hall that evening, jaw tight.

"I heard you are wandering the Gryffindor’s, laughing like an idiot with Potter's lot."

"They're nice, Marcus. We are just—"

"It's embarrassing," he cut in. "People talk. I don't need people saying my girlfriend's gone soft, tagging along after Gryffindors like a stray—you seem to have a particular fondness for the Weasleys lately, haven't you?" His hands tightened on your wrists, a sign of his losing patience.

Your heart beat fast, scared; it was dangerous for Marcus to pay too much attention to your affairs, because the few times he did, those people ended up hurt and gone. “"It's not what you think, don't worry about it." You stammered and felt silly for it.

"How curious, darling, because I think that's exactly what I think!" His hand flew quickly to your hair, pulling it and eliciting a sharp groan of pain from you. He brought his mouth close to your ear, murmuring, almost amused, but very annoyed. "Do you want to be a slut for the Weasleys? You're better than that, or you're supposed to be. Try acting like it." I let go of your hair and you staggered backward, rubbing the sore part of your scalp.

"I'm sorry," you said, because that was what you always said, the reflex worn smooth from years of use.

But that night, alone, you thought about Ron's ridiculous hand gestures, and Hermione's exasperated affection, and Harry's easy grin, and some small, private, unshakeable part of you decided: I'd will do it again. Tomorrow, if they'll have me. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Just know that you don't have to do this alone

Promise, I'll never let you down

George noticed the new bruise on a Sunday, catching a glimpse of it when your sleeve rode up as you reached for the teapot at breakfast — a mottled shadow along your forearm, days old already, the kind that had gone from angry purple to sickly yellow-green at the edges,courtesy of giving Marcus explanations about your new friendships.

He didn't say anything in front of everyone. He waited until the Great Hall had mostly emptied, then found you in the corridor outside, and didn't bother pretending he hadn't seen it.

"Come with me a second."

"George, I have class—"

"Two minutes." His voice was quiet, careful, none of his usual teasing lightness in it. "Please."

You followed him into an empty classroom, and he closed the door behind you, and for a moment neither of you said anything.

"Can I see it?" he asked finally.

You hesitated, then pulled your sleeve back without arguing, some tired part of you too worn down to keep hiding it from someone who'd clearly already seen.

George's jaw tightened at the sight of it, but he didn't say any of the furious things you could tell he was thinking. Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out a small vial of dittany — the kind every student carried for class things, the kind that had absolutely nothing to do with why he'd brought it today.

"I'm not going to ask you to leave him," he said, quiet, uncoiling the cap slowly. "I know that's not mine to ask, not really, not until you're ready to make that decision on your own terms. But I can't just watch this happen to you and do nothing either. So. Can I?"

You nodded, and he took your arm gently, careful in a way that made your breath catch — his fingers barely there at all, like he was afraid of adding even the smallest hurt to a place that already had too much of it. He dabbed the dittany along the bruise with painstaking slowness, watching your face rather than the wound, checking constantly that he wasn't causing you any more pain.

"You don't have to do this," you said, quietly, watching his bent head, the careful concentration in his face.

"I know I don't have to." He didn't look up. "I want to. There's a difference." His thumb brushed, feather-light, over the uninjured skin just beside the bruise, an absent, unconscious gesture that made something in your chest go tight and warm all at once. "I can't fix the rest of it. I know that. I can't make him stop, and I can't make whatever it is that has you tied to that idiot disappear, and I can't make any of it simpler than it actually is. But I can do this much. I can be here for the small things, if you'll let me. Every time. However small they are.”

The classroom was very quiet. You were standing close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that if either of you leaned even slightly, something would shift between you that neither of you had said out loud yet. George seemed to feel it too — his hand slowed on your arm, lingered a beat longer than the task required, and for a moment his eyes lifted from the bruise to your face, and held there.

"There," he said finally, voice a little rough, capping the vial and stepping back before either of you did something neither of you were ready for yet. "Should fade faster now. Not gone. But faster."

"Thank you," you said, and it came out smaller than you meant it to, weighted with more than just the dittany.

"You don't have to thank me for that." George tucked the vial back into his bag, not quite meeting your eyes now, like he was giving himself a second to steady something in his own chest. "Just — let me keep doing it. Whatever this is. However long it takes you to decide you deserve better than bruises you have to hide. I'll be right here the whole time."

You left that classroom with your sleeve back down and your pulse doing something complicated and unfamiliar, and you spent the rest of the day only half paying attention to anything else, replaying the particular gentleness of his hands, and wondering, not for the first time, what it might feel like to be touched like that by someone who never once made you flinch first.

Cause I know I can treat you better than he can

And any girl like you deserves a gentleman

The Gryffindor-Slytherin match was the one George would replay in his head for years afterward, for more reasons than the scoreline.

Gryffindor won, decisively, and George caught the tail end of it from the air with his broom under him and his blood still running hot from the game, and when he looked down at the stands, scanning without meaning to, he found you exactly where you always sat — a few rows up from the Slytherin end, close enough to Flint's family box to look like you belonged there, far enough to look like you didn't.

He winked at you. Pure instinct, pure victory-high showmanship, the kind of thing he'd have done at anyone in that moment — except it wasn't anyone, it was you, and he meant it the way he meant most things where you were concerned, which was to say: entirely.

Flint saw it.

George didn't clock that until he'd landed, boots hitting the pitch, teammates clapping him on the back, and Flint came stalking over from the Slytherin end with his jaw set.

"Careful, Weasley," Flint said, low, standing too close the way he always did when he wanted to loom over someone. "Wouldn't go eyeing up someone else's girlfriend if I were you."

George raised an eyebrow, unbothered, riding the high of the win. "Didn't realize I needed your permission to enjoy beating your team by ninety points."

"That's not what I—"

"Because that's what just happened, if you missed it. Ninety points. You lot barely got the Quaffle past our Keeper the entire second half."

A few of the Gryffindors around them snorted. Flint's face went a shade darker.

"You think you're clever," Flint said.

"I think I'm the Beater who just won the match, and you're the one who didn't score in the last twenty minutes. Those aren't opinions, mate, those are just facts written on a scoreboard."

George meant every word of that as exactly what it was — a jab about Quidditch, nothing more, because he'd decided a long time ago that he wasn't going to be the kind of person who talked about you like you were a trophy to be defended or fought over. That wasn't the point. You weren't a point to be scored. He wasn't going to make you into one just because Flint had started it.

But Flint wasn't finished, and when his attempts at riling George over the match kept failing to land, he reached for something else instead.

"Whatever," Flint said, and his mouth curled into something ugly. "Doesn't matter who's better at Quidditch. You can wink at her all you want, Weasley — doesn't change who she belongs to. She does what I tell her, when I tell her, and in a little while I'll have her on her knees sucking me off just because I say so; that's what you get with a girl who's learned her place. Wouldn't expect you to understand that — you've never had one."

The words hung there, filthy and casual, said like you were property already claimed rather than a person standing forty feet away who could probably hear at least some of this.

George didn't remember deciding to move. He just remembered his fist connecting with Flint's jaw, the jolt of impact running up his own arm, and the sudden roar of noise around them as half the pitch surged forward.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't heroic in the way stories make these things sound. It was two furious teenage boys throwing badly-aimed punches on churned-up grass, Flint's fist catching George's eyebrow and splitting it, George getting one good hit into Flint's ribs before Oliver Wood and other two Gryffindor's stopt him and one of the Slytherin Beaters hauled Marcus apart bodily.

"Get OFF me," George snarled, still trying to get another swing in even as they held him back by the shoulders.

"That's ENOUGH, both of you!"

Madam Hooch arrived within the minute, furious, docking points from both houses, threatening detentions for the rest of the term. George barely heard any of it. He was looking past her, to where you were standing frozen at the edge of the crowd, one hand pressed over your mouth, eyes wide with something that looked like horror and something else George couldn't quite name yet.

He hadn't done it to be a hero. That was the truth he'd tell you later, when you asked. He hadn't even really done it for you, not in the moment — it had been pure reflex, pure fury at hearing you spoken about like an object with no say in her own life. But looking at your face in that crowd, split lip and all, George couldn't bring himself to regret it.

Tell me, why are we wasting time on all your wasted cryin'

When you should be with me instead?

You found him afterward, in an empty corridor near the changing rooms, still pressing his sleeve to the cut above his eyebrow. You'd meant to check on him quickly and leave before anyone noticed you'd come at all.

You hadn't planned on him seeing your face first.

"What happened to your—" George's voice went hard the second he got a proper look at you, at the split in your lip you'd been trying to angle away from the torchlight. "Who did that."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me. Was it him? Did he do that because of the match, because of—"

"George! please, just—" Your voice cracked, and you hated that it cracked, hated how quickly you'd reverted to managing everyone else's reaction instead of your own. "You need to stay away from him and me for a while. I mean it. I know what he's like when he's like this, and I don't want you anywhere near it."

"I don't care what he's like. I'm not the one who needs protecting here—"

"You don't understand what he's capable of!” you snapped, sharper than you meant to, fear making your voice thin. "I do. I've had years to learn it. So forgive me for not wanting the person I—" You stopped yourself, too late, the word already half out.

George went very still. "The person you what?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It clearly does, since you almost said it."

You pressed your hands over your face for a second, trying to hold something together that had been fraying for months. "Why do you even care this much?! Why does it matter to you what he does, what I put up with — you barely know me, George, not really, not the whole—"

"Because I could make you happier than he ever has!" George said, and it came out rawer than his usual easy charm, stripped of all its jokes. "*I can treat you better!* In about five minutes, probably. That's not me being arrogant, that's just true, and you know it's true, which is exactly why it's driving me out of my mind watching you go back to him after everything I've seen him do! So no — tell me why! Why do you stay? Why won't you just leave, if you know what he is?!"

Something in you broke open, all at once, months of careful containment giving way at once.

"Because I can't just leave, George!" The words came out louder than you intended, echoing down the empty corridor. "There's a contract! There has been since I was nine years old — my parents signed it, his parents signed it, and it isn't about whether I like him or whether he treats me well or whether some other boy could make me happier, because none of that has ever once been the point! I don't get to just decide I'd rather have something else! I never have!"

The silence that followed felt enormous.

George opened his mouth — to say what, you'd never know, not that day, because you were already moving past him, wiping angrily at your eyes, refusing to stay and watch whatever expression was forming on his face. Pity, maybe. Or worse, understanding, which somehow felt harder to survive.

"Don't," you said, when he reached for your arm. "Please don't. I can't do this right now."

You left him standing alone in the corridor, torchlight flickering over a truth he hadn't been meant to hear yet, at least not like that — not shouted, not bleeding out of you in a hallway with your lip still split and your hands still shaking.

It was weeks later, back on the library floor because the good bench was occupied for once, that George finally worked up the nerve to bring it up properly — carefully this time, none of the heat from that corridor left in his voice.

"Can I ask you something? and you don't have to answer if it's too much."

"You can ask."

"I haven't told anyone. What you said, in the corridor. About the…the thing" George kept his eyes on the book he wasn't reading, giving you room not to look at him if you needed it. "I just — I want to understand it properly, if you'll let me. Not the legal part. The rest of it. How you got from a nine-year-old who didn't have a choice to who you are now."

You were quiet for a moment, turning the corner of your book over in your hands.

"I actually thought it would work," you said finally, and the honesty of it surprised even you. "In third year, when it started properly — the being seen together part, not the part my parents arranged years before that — I thought, maybe this doesn't have to be terrible. Maybe if I try hard enough, he'll fall for me the way people are supposed to fall for each other. I really believed that for a while. I wanted it to be true so badly I convinced myself it already was."

"What changed?"

"Nothing changed. That's the thing." Your voice went flatter, more matter-of-fact, like you'd rehearsed the explanation to yourself so many times it had lost its sting. "He never did. I kept waiting for some version of him to show up — kinder, softer, someone who noticed things about me the way I noticed things about him — and it just never came. Every time I let myself hope, he'd do something that proved the hope wrong. A comment in front of his friends. Forgetting something I'd told him mattered. And you can only get your hope proven wrong so many times before you stop bothering to have it at all."

"So you just—"

"Settled," you said, before he could find a gentler word for it. "Decided this was what I got, and there wasn't much point wanting more, because wanting more just meant getting disappointed on a schedule instead of by surprise."

George didn't say anything clever. He didn't reach for the easy charm he used to fill silences. He just sat with that for a moment, letting it be as heavy as it actually was.

"That's not settling," he said eventually. "That's surviving something. Those aren't the same, even if they feel the same from the inside."

You looked up at him.

"I know it probably sounds pathetic. Hoping for that long over nothing."

"It doesn't sound pathetic." George's voice was steady, certain, none of its usual joking in it. "It sounds like you kept trying to love someone properly even when he never once tried to love you back. That's not a flaw in you. That's just proof of what you're capable of, wasted on someone who never deserved a second of it."

Something in your chest loosened, hearing it put that way — like a weight you'd carried alone for years had finally been named out loud by someone else, which somehow made it lighter.

"I'm not saying this to talk you into anything," George added, quieter now. "You don't owe me a single thing for saying it. I just needed you to hear that none of it was your fault. Not one part."

You were quiet for a while, processing that, before something else occurred to you.

"Can I ask you something now?"

"Turnabout's fair play."

"Aren't you afraid," you said, carefully, "of doing all of this — showing up, being patient, saying things like what you just said — and having it not matter in the end? Having me stay anyway, because of the contract, because I don't actually get a choice? Doesn't that scare you, putting this much of yourself into someone who might not ever be able to choose you back?"

George considered that for a long moment, and when he answered, his voice had lost some of its usual confidence, gone rawer and more honest than you were used to hearing from him.

"Terrifies me, if I'm honest," he admitted. "Every single day. I lie awake sometimes running through every version of this where it doesn't work out — where you end up somewhere I can't follow, where all of this turns out to have been for nothing. It's not a comfortable thing to sit with." He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, not quite meeting your eyes. "But I decided a while ago that the alternative was worse. Not trying at all, just to protect myself from the possibility of losing something I never let myself have in the first place — that felt like a kind of cowardice I didn't want to live with. I'd rather love you and lose than never have loved you at all and called that safety."

"That's a very Gryffindor thing to say."

"I contain multitudes," George said, and the corner of his mouth twitched, some of his usual lightness creeping back in, though his eyes stayed serious. "But I mean it. Whatever happens with the contract, with your choice, with all of it — I'm not going anywhere unless you ask me to. I'm not keeping score of how long this takes. I'm not going to get tired of waiting and give up on you, the way everyone else in your life apparently has. That's not the kind of person I want to be, and it's definitely not the kind of person I want to be where you're concerned."

You looked at him for a long moment, something in your chest aching in a way that wasn't entirely sad.

"Nobody's ever said anything like that to me before," you said, quiet. "Not once. Not in my whole life."

"Well," George said, gentle, reaching over to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering just slightly longer than necessary. "Get used to it. I intend to keep saying things like that for as long as you'll let me."

You didn't say anything back right away. But you leaned your head against his shoulder, there on the library floor, and he let you, and neither of you moved for a long while.

It started raining hard on the walk back from the library that night, sudden and cold, the kind of downpour the castle grounds never gave any warning for. You'd both bolted the last stretch back toward the courtyard, laughing despite yourselves. You two found shelter under the overhang near the greenhouses.

"You're freezing," George said, watching you try and fail to hide the shiver running through you.

"I'm fine."

"You're distinctly not fine. Here." He was already shrugging out of his jumper before you could argue, pulling it over your head without waiting for permission, and you let him, because the wool was warm from his body heat and you were, admittedly, freezing.

"You'll be cold now," you pointed out, voice muffled slightly by the collar.

"I run hot. Perks of being constantly furious at Marcus Flint, apparently. Keeps the blood pumping."

You laughed, and the sound of it in the quiet, rain-heavy dark did something to George's chest that he didn't examine too closely. He reached out, without quite deciding to, and brushed a strand of hair back from your face, his fingers lingering a beat too long at your temple.

Neither of you moved. The rain kept falling in a steady curtain just past the overhang, and the space between you had gone very small, very charged, the kind of quiet that felt like it was waiting for something to happen.

"George," you said, quietly, not quite a warning, not quite an invitation either.

"I know," he said, just as quiet, close enough now that you could feel the warmth radiating off him despite the rain, close enough that his voice had dropped into something lower, rougher than his usual easy cadence. "I'm not going to do anything you don't want. I just — I like standing this close to you. Is that alright?"

"That's alright," you said, and your own voice came out breathless in a way that surprised you.

He didn't kiss you. He wanted to — you could see it, plain as anything, in the way his eyes kept dropping to your mouth and back up, in the careful restraint visible in the line of his shoulders — but he didn't, because he'd meant what he said in before, about waiting, about not being one more person who took something from you before you were ready to give it freely.

Instead he took your hand, laced his fingers loosely through yours, and simply stood there with you under the overhang, watching the rain, saying nothing else for a long while.

"Thank you," you said eventually, "for not pushing."

"I'm not in any rush," George said, and squeezed your hand once, gentle. "I've got nowhere better to be than exactly here, waiting for exactly you, for however long that takes."

By the time the rain let up enough to risk the walk back to the castle, you'd stopped shivering from the cold entirely, though you hadn't quite let go of his jumper, or his hand, and neither of you seemed in any particular hurry to fix that.

He took you up to the Quidditch pitch one night, long after curfew, with nothing but a blanket he'd nicked from his dormitory and a bag of stolen kitchen biscuits by way of explanation.

"This is either very romantic or wildly against about six different school rules," you said, as he spread the blanket out on the grass near the center circle, the stands empty and silent around you, the sky overhead scattered thick with stars.

"Can't it be both?"

You lay back beside him, close enough that your shoulders touched, and looked up at a sky you'd never actually taken the time to properly look at before, not like this, not without somewhere else you were supposed to be or someone else you were supposed to be managing.

"I used to come up here alone sometimes," George admitted, after a while, voice quieter than his usual register. "Before any of this. Before you, I mean. Just to think. Fred doesn't always understand when I need quiet — not because he's not good at reading me, he's better at it than anyone, but because quiet's not really his language. I needed somewhere that was just mine."

"And now you're sharing it."

"Now I'm sharing it," he agreed, and turned his head to look at you instead of the sky. "Didn't think I would, honestly. Didn't think I'd want to. But I like having you in the places that are mine. Doesn't feel like losing something, sharing them with you. Feels like the opposite, actually."

You turned onto your side to face him properly, close enough now that you could see every freckle across his nose in the dim starlight, close enough that the space between you had gone taut with the same charged quiet as the rain-soaked overhang weeks before.

"Can I ask you something?" you said.

"Anything."

"Why me? Properly, I mean. Not the flattering version you shout out loud. The real one."

George considered that for a long moment, like he wanted to get the answer exactly right rather than reach for something easy.

"Because you make hard things look survivable," he said finally. "Because you're the kind of person who notices when someone else is hurting before they've said a word about it, even after everything that's been done to you. Because when you laugh — really laugh, the kind you don't let yourself do enough — it's the best sound I've ever heard, and I've made it my entire personality to try and cause it as often as possible." He reached out, brushed his thumb along your jaw, gentle. "Because I've spent this whole year watching you get smaller and smaller under someone who doesn't deserve the smallest piece of you, and every single time, some part of you kept fighting to stay whole anyway. That's not nothing. That's the bravest thing I've ever watched anyone do."

You didn't trust your voice enough to answer that properly, so instead you just closed the last of the distance between you and rested your forehead against his, breathing the same air for a long, quiet moment, neither of you rushing toward anything neither of you were ready for yet.

"One day," George murmured, barely more than breath, "I'm going to get to kiss you properly, under a sky like this one, and it's going to be because you chose it. Not because I pushed. Not because the moment demanded it. Because you wanted it exactly as much as I do."

"One day," you agreed, quietly, and it didn't feel like a maybe. It felt, for the first time in longer than you could remember, like a promise you actually believed.

You fell asleep like that eventually, tucked against his side under a stolen blanket on a Quidditch pitch you'd both be in serious trouble for if caught, and woke before dawn to sneak back inside, laughing quietly the whole way, already counting down the days until you could come back.

I know I can treat you better, better than he can, oh

Better than he can

Better than he can

The near-kiss happened on a Thursday, in the kitchens again, months into whatever this had quietly become between you.

You were laughing at something George had said — he could never remember what, later, only that it had been stupid, some joke about Peeves and a jar of pickled toads — and he'd reached out to brush flour off your cheek, the same easy gesture he'd made a dozen times before, except this time neither of you moved away.

The kitchen had gone very quiet around you. Somewhere behind you, an elf was humming while it kneaded dough, entirely oblivious. George's hand was still at your jaw, and you were still looking up at him, and for one long, suspended moment, it felt like the whole castle was holding its breath along with the two of you.

He leaned in. You didn't pull back.

It was Tibby the elf, cheerfully announcing that the cinnamon buns were burning, that broke whatever spell had settled over the room, and you both jumped back like you'd been caught doing something far worse than almost kissing in a kitchen at midnight.

"I should— the buns—" you stammered, cheeks burning deep reed, though you made no move toward the oven.

"Right. Buns. Very important. Very time-sensitive crisis," George said, equally useless, his ears gone red too.

You left not long after, flustered in a way George had never seen from you, murmuring something about it being late, and he let you go without pushing, even though every part of him wanted to follow you and ask what you were thinking, what you were feeling, whether the almost had meant to you what it had meant to him.

You spent that whole night, back in your dormitory, staring at your canopy and trying to work out what exactly had just nearly happened, and why some small, guilty part of you had wanted it to.

George didn't sleep much better. He lay awake replaying it in fragments — the warmth of your skin under his fingers, the way your breath had caught, the half-second before Tibby's voice broke the spell where he'd been so close he could have counted your eyelashes. He told himself, firmly, that he'd done the right thing letting you go without pushing. He mostly believed it. The rest of him spent the night wishing, quietly and uselessly, that the elf's timing had been just a little worse.

You avoided the kitchens for four days afterward, not out of regret exactly, but out of not knowing what to do with the size of what you'd felt. George noticed the absence, and didn't chase it, though it cost him something every night he didn't see you there.

It was you, in the end, who broke the silence — finding him in the library on the fifth day, sitting down across from him without quite meeting his eyes.

"I keep thinking about it," you admitted, quiet, fidgeting with the corner of a page. "The kitchens. I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything with it," George said, gentle, setting his quill down to give you his full attention. "It happened. It meant something, I think, to both of us. That doesn't mean anything has to change today, or tomorrow, or on any particular schedule. We can just let it have happened."

"That's very reasonable of you."

"I contain reasonable moments, occasionally, against my better instincts." He tilted his head, studying you. "Can I ask you something, though? Not to pressure you. Just because I've been wondering."

"You can ask." You nodd, your heart pounding fast in your chest.

"Did you want me to close the distance? That night. Before Tibby ruined everything with her impeccable timing." He said it lightly, but there was something careful underneath it, some genuine uncertainty he was trying not to let show too much.

You thought about lying, about deflecting the way you'd learned to deflect everything that felt too dangerous to admit out loud. But George had spent over a year and a half being honest with you, patiently, consistently, without ever once demanding the same in return, and you found you didn't want to give him anything less than the truth.

"Yes," you said, simply. "I wanted it. I still want it, if I'm honest. I just don't know how to want something for myself yet, without it costing me something first."

George's expression softened into something you didn't have a word for yet — not quite relief, not quite joy, something gentler than both.

"It won't cost you anything with me," he said. "I promise you that. Whatever you decide, whenever you decide it — there's no bill coming due afterward. That's not how this works. Not with me."

You didn't say anything else. But you reached across the table and took his hand, and he held it like it was something precious, and for the rest of that afternoon, you sat together in the library doing very little actual studying, entirely content just to be near each other, waiting for whatever came next.

It was your birthday, and nobody remembered.

Not your parents, who hadn't sent so much as an owl in months beyond the occasional cold instruction about appearances and duty. Not Flint, who you'd stopped expecting anything from around your fourteenth birthday and hadn't been disappointed since, because you'd learned not to hope. Not even, it seemed, your own house, most of whom you'd drifted from without quite meaning to.

You hadn't told anyone the date on purpose. It felt easier that way — smaller stakes, less to be disappointed about.

Except somehow, Hermione had found out anyway—she would later admit to overhearing you mention it once, months prior, to Tibby in the kitchens, and filing it away for exactly this purpose—and by the time your Hogsmeade weekend rolled around, there was an entire quiet operation in motion that you knew nothing about.

You went to the village with Flint that morning, as arranged, as always — walking a respectful two feet behind him while he talked Quidditch strategy with his teammates and largely forgot you were there.

At one point, waiting outside Zonko's while Flint browsed something inside, you'd mentioned, carefully, lightly, that it was your birthday — a small test, some quiet part of you still hoping, even now, that he might surprise you.

"Is it?" Flint had said, barely glancing over, already turning back toward the window display. "Didn't realize we were doing birthdays. Get yourself something nice, then, if it matters that much to you." He hadn't offered to buy it. He hadn't offered anything at all beyond the barest acknowledgment that the date existed, and even that had come with faint irritation, like you'd inconvenienced him by mentioning it.

You'd resigned yourself to another birthday spent invisible, yes, but a part of you burned with rage, knowing, fervently wishing that you wished to be with your new friends, with George, any of them rather than with this idiot—That surprised you; you didn't just feel resignation, rather, you finally had the guts to feel anger, to know that you no longer wanted him in your life and now HE was your annoyance.

Then, outside Honeydukes, Ron "accidentally" spilled an entire bag of sugar quills directly into Flint's path, sending him into a fifteen-minute argument about whose fault the mess was, and by the time it resolved, you'd been quietly steered away by Ginny, who looped her arm through yours like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Come on," Ginny said, already walking. "We've got somewhere to be."

"Ginny, ¿What are you—I'm supposed to—"

"You're supposed to have a birthday that isn't miserable for once. Move faster!, he'll notice the sugar quill thing was a diversion eventually."

The Three Broomsticks had been quietly commandeered. There was a small stack of gifts nobody had needed to buy expensive things for — Hermione's spare copy of a book she knew you'd been wanting to borrow, a bag of sweets from Ron "because everyone deserves sweets on their birthday, that's just science," a ridiculous joke-shop trinket from Fred that immediately started singing when you opened it, Harry giving you a notebook with your name engraved on it and on the back the verse 'you are not small', beautiful and thoughtful gifts.

George's gift was a small, carefully wrapped tin of the same cinnamon buns you always made together in the kitchens, except he'd apparently talked Tibby into teaching him the recipe in secret, and made them himself, badly, slightly burnt at the edges.

"They're not as good as yours," he admitted, sliding into the seat next to you. "But I figured you shouldn't have to make your own birthday treats."

You stared down at the slightly lopsided tin, throat tight, and it took you a long moment to trust your own voice.

"Nobody's ever done this," you said. "Any of this. Remembered. On purpose. Thank you so much, to all of you” You gave thanks, a bright smile on your face, your eyes watering.

"Well," George said, bumping his shoulder against yours, easy and warm. "Get used to it. This is what it's supposed to feel like, having people who notice you. We're not going to stop just because you're not used to it yet."

You spent the rest of the afternoon laughing — really laughing, the loud kind, the kind you'd almost forgotten you had in you — surrounded by five people who'd conspired an entire secret operation just to make sure you didn't spend your birthday invisible, and it was, without question, the best afternoon you'd had in years.

Near the end of it, while Ron and Fred argued loudly over the last of the sugar quills and Hermione and Harry tried, unsuccessfully, to referee, George pulled you aside for a moment, out onto the little corner overlooking the street.

"One more thing," he said, a little sheepish, reaching into his pocket. "It's not much. Wasn't planned, either, if I'm honest — I saw it in the window on the way here and couldn't walk past it."

It was a small enamel pin, shaped like a sunflower, the kind of cheap trinket that cost next to nothing and meant everything anyway.

"You once told me you liked sunflowers," George said, "because they turn toward the light instead of away from it, even on the cloudy days." He turned it over in his fingers before offering it to you properly. "Felt like it suited you. Turning toward the light even when you've had every reason not to."

You took it carefully, throat too tight to manage much of a response.

"Happy birthday," George said, softer now. "I know today's not really about presents. But I wanted you to have something that was just yours — not shared, not managed, not waiting to be taken away. Just a small, stupid flower that's entirely, unconditionally yours."

You pinned it to your collar right there, and wore it for the rest of the day, and long after that afternoon had ended, you kept it fastened somewhere on you nearly every day that followed — a small, quiet reminder that you were allowed to turn toward whatever light you found, however small it started out.

You ended it with Flint in April, in the Entrance Hall, in front of enough people that word reached the furthest corners of the castle within the hour.

George hadn't planned it, hadn't orchestrated it, hadn't even known it was coming — he only happened to be crossing the hall at the exact moment Flint made some careless, cutting remark about your family's and your body "usefulness" being the only reason he'd bothered with you at all, and something in you that had been quietly gathering strength for months finally, completely, snapped.

"You know what?," you said, and your voice didn't shake, not once, "I'm done. I'm done pretending this is anything, and I'm done letting you talk to me like I'm an inconvenience you're stuck tolerating. You've never once treated me like I mattered, Marcus, not for one single day, and I'm not spending one more doing this, You're mean, boring, unfaithful, and completely charmless, by Merlin! Any minute away from you is better!."

Flint's face went through several colors. "You!—you don't get to just—"

"I do, actually," you cut in, and something in your posture had changed, straightened, like you'd finally remembered you were allowed to take up space. "I get to decide I'm done being an arrangement instead of a person. Watch me."

"You'll regret this," Flint said, low, ugly, reaching for the only weapon he had left. "Your parents will hear about it by tonight. You'll lose everything. Nobody's going to want you after this — not with your name attached to a broken contract, not with the scandal that comes with it. You'll have nothing."

"Then I'll have nothing," you said, and the strange thing was, it didn't scare you the way it once would have. "I'd rather have nothing that's actually mine than everything that was never really mine to begin with. You made sure of that a long time ago, Marcus — you made sure there wasn't anything left here worth protecting. So no. I don't think I'll regret it. I think this is the first genuinely good decision I've made in years."

You thought, distantly, of Hermione's voice telling you that you were allowed to take up the space you already occupied. Of Ron's blunt, easy confidence, arguing without apologizing for having an opinion. Of Harry, quiet by the fire, telling you that wanting more than tolerance was never something you needed to earn. Of george telling you that ypu deserved someone better. It was their voices, more than your own, that had taught you how to say all of this without flinching — and yet the words that came out were entirely, finally, yours.

You walked away from him in front of half the school, spine straight, and didn't look back once, and George — who'd stopped dead a few feet away, absolutely transfixed — didn't move to help, didn't step in, didn't do a single thing except watch you fight your own battle and win it entirely on your own terms.

He caught up with you later, once you'd had time to breathe, once the shaking in your hands had mostly stopped.

"You didn't need me for that," he said, quiet, something like awe still in his voice.

"No," you agreed. "I didn't. But I think I needed you, and Fred, and Harry, and Ron, and Hermione, to get me to the person who could do it without you. Does that make sense?"

"Makes perfect sense," George said, softer now. "That's sort of how it's supposed to work, I think. Nobody gets brave entirely alone. They just get brave with enough people behind them that it starts to feel possible."

"Good," You said, and meant it completely.

"I'd have hated for that to be the story. Some bloke swooping in instead of you finally getting to do it yourself."

You looked at him properly then, really looked, and something settled into place that had been slowly building for the better part of a year.

"Buy me lunch, Weasley," you said, and it came out lighter than anything you'd said in years. "Since apparently you've been trying to convince me you'd treat me better this whole time." You teased.

"Only took you a year and a half to notice," George said, grinning like he'd won something far bigger than a Quidditch match, and offered you his arm.

Obviously George will treat you better than the other guy can!

He spent the following weeks in a state of near-insufferable smugness, introducing you to anyone who hadn't already heard, looping an arm around your shoulders at every meal, telling anyone within earshot some variation of "yeah, this is my girlfriend, took her long enough to see sense" with a grin too wide for his own face. You didn't mind the showing off. After years of being nobody's priority, being someone's proud, loud, obvious choice felt like sunlight after a long winter.

He introduced you to a group of bewildered second-years in the corridor one afternoon, entirely unprompted, for no reason other than that they happened to be standing there when the urge struck him.

"This is my girlfriend!" he announced, gesturing at you with the flourish of someone unveiling a prized trophy. "Best-looking girl in this castle. Also cleverer than me, which admittedly isn't saying much, but still, Can you believe she chose ME?."

"George, they don't even know who you are."

"They will now. That's the whole point of an introduction." He turned back to the thoroughly confused second-years, entirely unbothered. "Carry on. Spread the word if you like. I won't stop you."

Fred found the whole thing endlessly entertaining, and made absolutely no effort to let George forget it.

"He's been like this for a weeks," Fred informed you, gravely, at breakfast one morning, while George buttered your toast without being asked, an automatic gesture he no longer seemed to notice himself doing. "Introducing you as his girlfriend to house-elves. To ghosts. I caught him telling Nearly Headless Nick about you yesterday, in full detail, unprompted."

"Nick was very supportive," George said, entirely unrepentant. "He said we make a lovely couple. That's a five-hundred-year-old ghost's opinion, Fred. You don't just dismiss that kind of endorsement."

"I'm not dismissing it. I'm simply pointing out that my brother has become completely unbearable, and it's your fault, and I'd like the old George back at some point, if it's not too much trouble.

"Never," George said, cheerfully, pressing a kiss to your temple in a way that made Fred groan theatrically into his own breakfast. "You're stuck with this version now. Should've said something before you let her fall for me."

"I didn't let you do anything," Fred pointed out. "You did that entirely on your own, over the better part of a year, with alarming dedication."

"Exactly. Alarming dedication! It worked, didn't it?" George grinned at you, unbothered by his brother's exasperation, utterly delighted with how things had turned out. "Best decision I ever made, being embarrassingly persistent about a girl who was worth every bit of it."

You leaned into him, laughing, and found you didn't mind the audience at all — didn't mind being introduced to strangers and ghosts and anyone else George felt like telling, because for the first time in your life, someone wanted the whole world to know you belonged to each other, and there was nothing about that you needed to hide or manage or apologize for.

George, it turned out, had been keeping a mental list for the better part of this time of every small thing he'd do for you, if he ever got the chance, and now that he had it, he worked through that list with the single-minded determination he usually reserved for pranks.

He carried your books without being asked, and made a whole production of it, groaning theatrically about the weight until you laughed and swatted his arm. He pulled out your chair at meals, which made Fred cackle the first time he did it, and which George did anyway, every single time, without fail. He walked you to every class that was even remotely on his way, and several that weren't.

"You know Ancient Runes isn't anywhere near the Quidditch pitch," you pointed out once.

"Isn't it? Huh. Must've gotten turned around." He hadn't gotten turned around. You both knew it.

He kissed you for the first time properly a week after the lunch — slow, and a little uncertain despite all his usual confidence, like he wanted to make absolutely sure it was something you wanted too before he committed to it. When you kissed him back, he made a small, delighted sound against your mouth that he'd deny making for the rest of his life.

He took you on your first proper date that same week, and made no secret of the fact that he'd been planning it since long before you were officially his to plan anything for.

"I should warn you," he said, meeting you outside the Great Hall with an expression somewhere between nervous and pleased with himself, "this isn't going to be fancy. I haven't got Flint's kind of money to throw at impressing you. But I have got about a year's worth of ideas saved up, so hopefully that counts for something."

"If the date includes you, it sounds like a great plan" you replied, calming him down and making him blush.

It didn't need to be fancy. He'd gotten permission — through means he refused to fully explain — to use one of the smaller courtyards after hours, and strung it with fairy lights nicked from a decorations cupboard, and laid out a blanket with food smuggled up from the kitchens with Tibby's enthusiastic help: the good bread, a wheel of cheese, a stack of the cinnamon buns you'd taught him to make, and a bottle of butterbeer he'd saved his allowance to afford.

"George. This is—" You looked around at the small, lopsided magic of it, string lights swaying gently overhead, and found you didn't have a word ready for what it actually was.

"It's not much," he said again, that same nervous refrain he always reached for when he was giving you something that mattered to him.

"It's everything," you said, and meant it entirely. "Nobody's ever done this much thinking about what I'd like. Not once. Not in my whole life."

"Well." George pulled out the makeshift seat he'd arranged — an overturned crate with a cushion on it, absurd and perfect — with the exact same theatrical flourish he'd have used for a proper chair at a proper restaurant. "Get used to it. I intend to keep doing this kind of thing embarrassingly often."

He asked you real questions that night, the kind nobody had bothered asking in years — what you actually wanted to do after Hogwarts, not what your family expected of you; what made you happiest as a child, before any of the contract had touched your life; what you were afraid of, and what you weren't afraid of anymore, now that you'd already survived the worst of it. He listened to every answer like it mattered, like you mattered, without once glancing away to something more interesting happening elsewhere in the room.

"You're staring," you told him, halfway through the second cinnamon bun.

"I'm allowed to. You're my girlfriend now. There's a very short list of rules that come with that title, but staring at you as much as I like is definitely one of the perks."

"Is that in writing somewhere?"

"I'll draft something formal if you'd like. Very official. Ministry-approved stamp and everything."

You laughed, and he watched you do it with the same open, unguarded delight he always did, like your laugh was still the best thing that happened to him on any given day, even now that he got to hear it whenever he wanted.

By the time the fairy lights started to dim and the night grew properly cold, you'd talked for hours about nothing that mattered and everything that did, and George walked you back to the Hufflepuff common room with his jacket around your shoulders and his hand in yours the whole way, and kissed you goodnight slow and unhurried at your door, like he had every intention of doing exactly this again as many nights as you'd let him.

"Any girl deserves this," he told you, quiet, forehead resting against yours. "The being asked real questions. The being looked at like she's the only interesting thing in the room. The gentleman treatment, or whatever you want to call it. You especially deserve it, after everything. I just intend to be the one providing it from now on, if that's alright with you."

"That's more than alright with me," you said, and kissed him again before you let yourself go inside.

After that, he found endless small reasons to touch you — a hand at your waist, fingers laced with yours under tables, a kiss pressed to your temple in passing that he didn't even seem to think about, it just happened, constant and easy, like he'd been saving up months of restraint and had no intention of rationing it now.

The nicknames came almost immediately, and multiplied at an alarming rate.

"Love," he called you, and then "darling," and then, with increasing frequency, ridiculous things invented purely to make you laugh — "my star pupil" after you helped him with an essay, "menace," fondly, after you got him back for a prank with one of your own, "sunshine," said quietly, seriously, on the rare occasions he wasn't trying to be funny at all.

"You don't have to keep making up new ones," you told him once, laughing, after he'd called you three different things in the space of one breakfast.

"I've got a backlog," George said, entirely unrepentant. "Year and a half of nicknames I never got to use. I'm working through it."

"There's no rush."

"There's no rush," he agreed, threading his fingers through yours under the table, "but I've never claimed to be a patient man, love. Get used to that too."

Just like everything good, there were also bad moments; these were the most important to show you how much you had now that you didn't have before.

The letter from your parents arrived in May, cold and clipped as ever, informing you that word of the broken arrangement had reached them, that you had embarrassed the family, that you shouldn't expect their support going forward given your choices.

You read it alone in the owlery, and you cried — not because you regretted anything, but because some small, stubborn part of you had still hoped, right up until that letter, that there might be some version of your parents who would choose you over the contract, the status.

There wasn't. There never had been. But reading the words in ink made the truth of it undeniable in a way it hadn't been before.

George found you there an hour later, because Fred had come looking after you didn't show up to dinner, and George had known, somehow, exactly where to check.

"They're not going to change," you said, before he could ask, holding the letter out to him. "I think some part of me knew that. I just needed it in writing, I suppose."

George read it, jaw tight, and didn't say anything cruel about your parents even though he clearly wanted to.

"You're not losing a family," he said instead, carefully. "You're losing people who were never going to give you one in the first place. That's different."

"It doesn't feel different right now."

"I know," he said. "It will."

Molly Weasley's letter arrived three days later, and George had absolutely nothing to do with it — Ginny had written home about everything, the whole story, without telling George she was doing it, and Molly, predictably, hadn't wasted a single day once she'd heard.

The letter was addressed to you directly, in careful, warm handwriting:

*My dear girl,

Ginny's told me everything, and I want you to know first and foremost that none of what happened to you was your fault, and that you were brave to walk away from it. I know a bit about what it means to feel unwelcome in your own family — not the same as your situation, perhaps, but enough to understand the particular ache of it.

You should know there is a place for you here, at the Burrow, whenever you'd like it — for holidays, for summers, for any ordinary Tuesday you'd like company. Harry's been part of this family for years now without a drop of Weasley blood in him, and as far as I'm concerned, if we can make room for one more at that table, we can always make room for one once more. Our door doesn't check bloodlines before it opens, dear. It only checks whether you need somewhere warm to be.

Come whenever you like. I'll have the kettle on.

With love,

Molly Weasley*

You read it four times before you could speak, and then you cried again — a different kind of crying than the owlery tears, something looser and lighter, like a held breath finally released.

"She didn't have to do that," you told George later, letter still clutched in your hands.

"That's sort of the whole point of my mum," George said, smiling. "She doesn't do things because she has to. She does them because leaving someone out in the cold when there's room at her table would be worse than the extra washing up.".

You arrived at the Burrow for the first time on a warm afternoon in late June, standing nervously at the garden gate with a single trunk—The one you had at Hogwarts, and now being all you had— and a stomach full of nerves you couldn't quite talk yourself out of.

"You can still change your mind," George said, watching you hesitate, his hand warm and steady in yours. "Nobody's going to be offended if you need more time."

"I'm not changing my mind," you said, though you didn't move yet either, taking in the crooked, impossible architecture of the house rising up in front of you, chickens scattering somewhere in the yard, the distant sound of someone — Fred, probably — laughing at something.

"You're allowed to be nervous. It's a lot, showing up somewhere new and hoping it sticks."

"It's not that I don't want to be here," you said, quiet, trying to find the words for something you hadn't fully examined yet. "It's that I don't quite know how to walk into a house and just — belong there. Immediately. Without earning it first. I've never done that before."

George squeezed your hand. "You don't have to earn anything here. I know that's hard to believe, given everything, but I promise you, nobody in that house is keeping score. Mum decided you belonged here the second Ginny told her what happened. That's just how she works. You don't audition for my mother's love. You just show up, and she loves you, and that's the whole process."

The door opened before you'd even reached it, and Molly Weasley came barreling out with the particular unstoppable warmth she brought to everything, pulling you into a hug so immediate and complete that you didn't have time to feel awkward about it before it was already happening.

"There you are!" Molly said, like you were late rather than simply arriving for the first time, like your presence in her garden was the most natural thing in the world rather than something either of you needed to negotiate. "Come in, come in! you must be exhausted from the journey. I've got the kettle on, and Ginny's been talking my ear off about wanting you in her room instead of the spare, if that suits you — she's already cleared half her wardrobe, bless her, though I told her that was entirely unnecessary and she did it anyway."

You found yourself being swept through the door before you'd fully processed any of it, into a kitchen that smelled like fresh bread and something sweet baking, a clock on the wall with hands for each family member instead of numbers, photographs crowding every surface, warm and lived-in and entirely unlike the cold, careful house you'd grown up in.

"This is a lot," you admitted, quietly, to George, once Molly had bustled off to fetch something from the pantry.

"Good lot or bad lot?"

"Good lot," you said, and meant it, watching Fred wander in already mid-argument with Ron about something you couldn't follow, watching Ginny appear at the top of the stairs already calling down about which drawer she'd cleared for you. "I think I just never know houses could feel like this. Loud, and messy, and like everyone actually wants you in it."

"Get used to it," George said, echoing the promise he'd been making you in a dozen small ways for over a year now. "This is just what home's supposed to feel like. Took you long enough to get here. But you're here now."

You spent that first evening at the long kitchen table, meeting the rhythms of a family that had decided to make room for you without a single condition attached, and somewhere between Molly insisting you eat a second helping and Fred attempting to teach you a card game with rules he kept changing mid-hand, you realized you'd stopped bracing for the moment it would all be taken away.

It didn't come. It never came. And slowly, over that long golden summer, you let yourself believe it never would.

a house that never checked bloodlines before it opened its door

By the time winter came, you found yourself, improbably, sitting at the long wobbly table in the Burrow's kitchen, wrapped in a jumper Molly had knitted with your initial on it exactly as George had promised she would, listening to Fred and George argue about whose fault it was that the garden gnomes had gotten into the shed again.

You'd taken to helping Molly in the kitchen most mornings, the two of you falling into an easy rhythm that reminded you, pleasantly, of stolen midnights with Tibby in the Hogwarts kitchens — except here nobody needed to sneak, nobody needed an excuse, and the flour on your hands was simply flour, not evidence of some small rebellion you had to hide.

"You've got a good hand with pastry," Molly told you one morning, watching you fold dough with a confidence you hadn't had a year ago. "George mentioned you used to bake with the house-elves at school. I can see why. You've got the patience for it."

"I liked having somewhere nobody expected anything from me," you admitted once again. "The elves never wanted anything except company."

"Well." Molly bumped her shoulder against yours, warm and easy, exactly as his son. "You've got that here too, dear. Nobody at this table wants anything from you except exactly what you already are. Took George long enough to bring you round to see it for yourself, but I'm glad he finally managed it."

Harry caught your eye across the table and grinned — an easy, knowing grin, the kind between people who'd found their way into the same unlikely family from opposite directions. Ron passed you the potatoes without being asked.

George, for his part, had gone completely soft in a way Fred never let him forget.

He kept finding excuses to sit closer than strictly necessary, kept reaching over to fix a strand of your hair that hadn't actually needed fixing, kept staring at you across the table with an expression so unguarded and besotted that Ginny eventually threw a bread roll at his head just to make it stop.

"You're doing the face again," she informed him.

"What face?"

"The one where you look like someone hexed you with a permanent sticking charm of pure devotion. It's putting me off my dinner."

"I don't have a face!" He pretend to be offended.

"You've absolutely got a face," Fred confirmed, unhelpfully, around a mouthful of potatoes. "Been wearing it since two years ago.Reckon it's stuck for good at this point."

George didn't even bother denying it. He just reached for your hand under the table, laced his fingers through yours, and kept right on wearing whatever face he was apparently wearing, entirely without shame.

Hermione arrived that afternoon too, tumbling out of the Floo in a cloud of soot with a stack of books she swore she'd only brought "just in case," and the second she spotted you, she crossed the kitchen and hugged you properly, the kind of hug that had nothing performative in it.

"You look different this year" Hermione said, holding you back at arm's length to study you properly. "Lighter. It suits you."

"I feel different," you admitted, and meant it. You thought, sometimes, about the girl who used to apologize for asking someone to repeat themselves, who used to swallow her own opinions rather than risk an argument, who used to believe silence was the safest thing she had to offer the world. She felt like someone else now — someone you remembered fondly, almost, the way you might remember an old photograph of yourself, recognizable but no longer quite you.

"We should test that," Ron said, through a mouthful of the biscuits Molly had left cooling on the counter, entirely undeterred by his mother's swat at his hand. "Go on, then. Tell George something you actually think, instead of something nice."

"Ronald," Hermione said, exasperated.

"What? It's a legitimate test!"

You considered George for a moment, who was watching the whole exchange with obvious delight, clearly not remotely worried about what you might say.

"Your hair looks ridiculous today," you told him. "Properly ridiculous. Like you lost an argument with a hedge."

George gasped, mock-wounded, one hand pressed dramatically to his chest. "That's slander. That's actionable!"

"It's the truth, and I'm allowed to say it now, apparently," you said, and the whole table dissolved into laughter, Ron cackling loudest of all, thoroughly satisfied with his experiment.

"Penny for your thoughts," George said later, quiet, just for you, while Fred and Molly's argument rose to a fever pitch behind them over something to do with the gnomes.

"Just thinking," you said, "that I used to believe this was the most I could ever hope for. A seat at someone else's table, if I was useful enough to earn it."

"And now?"

You looked around the table — at Molly threatening bodily harm over the state of the garden, at Harry and Ron laughing too hard at something, at Hermione mid-argument with Ginny about something from a book, at Fred already plotting some new mischief, at George's hand still holding yours like it belonged there, at the ridiculous, devoted, unguarded look on his face that he'd apparently decided he had no interest in hiding anymore.

"Now I know the difference," you said, "between being tolerated and being chosen."

George smiled at that — the real one, the one he saved only for you — and later that evening, once the noise of dinner had settled into the lazy quiet of a full house winding down, he found you alone by the garden gate, watching the last of the light fade gold over the paddock.

"Can I tell you something?" he asked, coming to stand beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours.

"You can tell me anything."

"I used to lie awake trying to work out what it was about you, specifically. Why it was you and not anyone else." He was quiet for a moment, searching for the words. "I think I finally worked it out.It's not just that you're kind, though you are, more than anyone I've ever met. It's that you kept being kind even when nobody was kind back to you. You kept noticing other people even when no one noticed you. That's not an easy thing to keep doing, when you're not getting anything back for it. Most people would've closed themselves off years ago. You didn't. And I think that's the bravest thing I've ever seen anyone do, and I fell in love with you somewhere in the middle of watching you do it, long before I ever said a single word to you about it."

You didn't say anything right away. You just leaned into him, let him wrap an arm around your shoulders, and watched the sun finish setting over a garden that had somehow, improbably, become the first place in your whole life that felt entirely, unconditionally like home.

"I love you too," you said, finally, simply, the words landing easy and certain in a way you'd never once managed to feel with anyone before him. "I don't think I said that yet. Properly. Out loud."

"No," George agreed, pressing a kiss to your temple, smiling against your skin. "You didn't. Feel free to make a habit of it, though. I really don't mind hearing it."

Behind you, the noise of the Burrow carried on — Fred and Ron arguing about something ridiculous, Molly's voice rising over all of it, Hermione's laugh cutting through the chaos, Ginny threatening someone with a wooden spoon. It was loud, and messy, and nothing at all like the cold, careful house you'd grown up in.