AMOR FATI . . . fred weasley

II. ORDER OF THE PENIS

11:18AM 10/7/1995

.·。.·゜✭·.·✫·゜·。..·。.·゜✭·.·✫·゜·。.

CALL HER A STEREOTYPICAL HUFFLEPUFF, whatever, but Joey's literally grateful for everything. (Except Mondays and confrontation and big crowds but, you know, apart from that.) Like Ivy and Pyotr finishing each other's sentences, Quidditch, Barry Ryan, the twins, Hogwarts, the twins. Cedric, naturally. Well she is. Was.

Except being grateful for everything is kind of difficult, when your brother's pushing up the daisies and you're left frantically picking up the pieces, in a house that teems with dead things. Stinks of them, honestly: every mildewed curtain, dank and damp and rotting away.

Death feels worse in daylight, Joey thinks. Even when late morning sunlight slides like syrup into her bedroom, dappling its golden patterns on her sheets.

She can't believe it either, the fact that Fred actually came to join her last night, or the fact that the blanket wall she always builds to separate them somehow dismantles by midnight. She woke up grinning like an idiot, burying her face in the pillows that he slept on to breathe in his tell-tale aroma of cinnamon, debating the possibility that she'd be smiling forever and ever.

Then her dearest lover Guilt just had to come along and crash the party, and reminded her why he'd slept with her in the first place (nightmares), and then reminded her, oh so kindly, why she'd been having those nightmares in the first place (Cedric. Not that Cedric himself is the stuff of nightmares, obviously he isn't. Wasn't.).

So just like that, the smile's gone as Joey rolls reluctantly out of bed and begins the hunt for a pair of socks and Cedric's Quidditch jumper.

She's only been there a day and she's already discovered - the hard way! - that Grimmauld Place screams with both life and death. All it needs, Joey thinks, is a nice therapeutic clean (although you won't catch her doing it, no thank you), but she does suppose that Sirius Black has had slightly more important priorities recently. With the whole being a fugitive thing and everything.

Still, the house is more of a pigsty than Fred and George's bedroom - and that is no small feat! Joey runs down the stairs, sliding down the banister in a desperate attempt to make herself laugh. She even cheerily wishes Walburga Black's portrait a good morning, but judging by the response she receives (Blood traitor! Filthy redhead! Begone from the house of my fathers!), Joey reckons the painting's having as good a morning as she is.

Which isn't very good, by the way. The mornings are the worst. And the evenings. OK, fine, admittedly: all twenty-four hours of the day just aren't very lovely whatsoever!

There's no sign of life in the kitchen either, which is odd, because Joey reckons this is probably everybody's favourite room in the house. (At least, if your name is Ron Weasley, that is.) She boils the kettle, enveloping herself in hazy lilac steam, and it isn't until she's looking stupidly at two cups of tea that she realises what she's done, out of habit.

In a desperate attempt to compose herself, Joey sags against the counter, thinking desperately of happy things. Fred and George Fred and George Fred and George. But it doesn't work, and as she teeters on the edge of oblivion, all she can think of is how she'd give anything to share one last cup of tea with her Ceddie.

Not to be dramatic or anything, because she's not Pyotr Zalewski, but Joey would sell all her organs to a shop on Knockturn Alley just for one last glimpse of him.