A Second Look

A Second Look

Oi, can you hear me?

George starts; his mother, sobbing into his shoulder as the casket is lowered into the ground, merely pulls him closer and continues to ruin George's navy dress robes.

You aren't crying, are you?

Across the aisle from the Weasleys, Angelina Johnson stares blankly into nothing, a faint light-pink scar on her cheek and tears streaming down her pale, drawn face. Alicia Spinnet and Katie Bell hold her hands on either side of her, wiping at eyes and noses with handkerchiefs.

She meant nothing to me, you know.

"Shut up," George hisses, and his mother looks askance at him for a moment before subsiding to muffle her sniffles in his shoulder.

Prefect are we now? Georgie the Earless Prefect, how'd that go over I wonder?

His hands clench in his lap, the fabric of his robes imprinting their weave on his tense hands. The voice in his head is as familiar to him as the sunlight that shines down on them; he hears it every morning and every night and every minute in between, and he wishes that it would just stop.

C'mon now, George, you don't really want me to leave now, not when I've put a flea in your ear - oh wait, yes, I did just say that -

Thankfully, his mother turns around and throws her arm around Arthur instead, leaving George free to get up from his chair and walk away. He feels the eyes of the assembled on his back, but he doesn't turn around; he knows what he'll see, and there's no point in going back now.

Two hours later and he's almost through a bottle of Firewhiskey, the burn doing nothing to ward off the chill that seems to have settled in George's chest. His head rests on the bar, watching his fingers play idly with the rings of liquid on the varnished surface. Someone isn't watching where they're going and before George can get out of the way, he's got the most part of two mugs of mead down the back of his robes.

He drags himself into the men's, locating an empty cubicle with a minimum of swaying and blurring, and dries the damp robes with a blast of warm air from his wand. He'd take them off and clean them, but George's cleaning spells aren't world-famous for a reason and they're even worse when he's seeing double.

He washes his hands in the flow of cool water from the tap at the tiny sink; splashes some on his face to cool down the flushing that inevitably accompanies such quantities of alcohol. He glances up, only briefly, into the small, badly-lit mirror above the sink, but then his eyes hold and he can't look away.

In this light, it's his face that George sees. The hair is the same, the freckles, the curve of the jaw - always the same, every detail, and suddenly George can't look in the mirror anymore. There is a burn at the back of his eyes, and in his throat; he ignores the first and concentrates on the second, making it to the porcelain toilet bowl just in time.

Pathetic, Gred, not even a bottle of the stuff and you're already on the floor. Haven't been training lately?

"Get out of my head!" George rasps, his throat still parched and acid.

But I can't, can I, Georgie old boy, not when I'm the only thing keeping you sane.

George doesn't remember how he gets home. It's not the Burrow, or Bill's place, it's their little flat above the shop in Diagon Alley. He wonders just for a second why he chose to come here, but that thought is pushed from his mind by the encroaching darkness as he collapses on a bed.

Wake up, George.

Wake up.

WAKE UP.

Groaning, he rolls onto his back. It's cloudy outside, thank Merlin, there's no sunlight to hurt his still-burning eyes. Casting a Sobriety Charm on himself, George staggers into the tiny kitchenette and pours himself a glass of water, mixing in some of the Pain Potion they - he - keeps the cupboards stocked with. It's a year old but it works just the same; within minutes the headache is gone and the nausea has not made an appearance. George goes to dress for his first day at the Ministry - they're still finding nasty Hexes and Jinxes lacing booby-traps that have already killed or maimed more than one accidental discoverer, and before anyone can come back to work at the offices the rooms and halls have to be stripped.

We'd never get caught by one of those, we made half of the traps they've used, and the detectors to go with them. Take some from downstairs, George, it's not like anyone's buying them. Go on, I won't even take it out of your pay.

George doesn't take any of the detectors.

Today the room that he and two other wizards have been assigned to is all but empty - deep within the Department of Mysteries, its walls are tall and made of a black-brown stone. In the very middle of the room, raised on a dais, is a frame with some tattered rags hanging from it. Despite the still air in the room, George could swear the ragged curtain is fluttering in some imperceptible breeze.

The voice in his head is louder than ever, and won't shut up.

I've got your ear, y'know. It's all bloody down one side. Probably matches up with that great scar you've got, and the hole. Saint-like, indeed. Really, George, I still can't believe you wasted the first ear-joke you had with something pathetic like 'holey'. Could have at least gone for something like 'earful', but no, 'holey'.

Oddly, the closer George gets to the dais and the Veil, the more the voice sounds like it's coming from the Veil and not from inside his own head.

Go and have a look at it then, can't be that dangerous, it's just an old curtain. Promise I won't tell that you were scared.

George edges warily closer; the two wizards working to clear the room with him have their backs to him, and they were specifically ordered not to interfere with the Veil -

Since when did rules ever stop us, George-o? Go on, take a shufty, it's hardly going to hurt you.

He peers into the doorway holding the curtain. There's nothing behind it, just a chill feeling that creeps into his bones and makes it difficult to move. The voice is egging him on, and he reaches out a hand to touch the scraps of fabric -

- he screams, falling and falling and falling into an impenetrable icy grey mist that surrounds him, leaching away warmth and life and -

- he falls out onto a sunny hillside, rolling down the hill with someone else to land in a tangle of limbs eerily similar to his own.

George pushes himself up so he can look down at the familiar freckled face grinning up at him from the lush grass.

"What took you so long? I thought you were never going to come."

"No idea, Fred."