Retrospect

In retrospect, he had known it was going to hurt. That's what he told himself as he sat on the sterile white bed in the sterile white room where they had placed him. Well, it's not like he could've moved anyway. At first they hadn't used any Charms at all, but when he had gotten up and started to bolt for the door, the orderlies had been quick to restrain him. They had dumped him unceremoniously onto the bed again, forcing him to sit crosslegged and placing a rather strong Sticking Charm on his bottom of all places.

He almost laughed at that, almost. Of course they'd taken his wand away when he'd been admitted. He could still remember the horrible nasal voice of the receptionist calling for the doctor.

"Disoriented... tried to Splinch himself..."

Then the owlish gray eyes of the doctor looking down at him, and his mother's hands rubbing his shoulders, her voice saying over and over,

"it's all right. George it's going to be all right."

And he had smiled, a slow lazy smile, shaking his head in wonder at how in the world his mother thought everything would come out all right. They had gotten him. The demons. The demons the death eaters sent after him when his twin brother was killed. It had felt like half of him was missing. In the days shortly following he had howled with grief, unable to remain stoic like the rest of his family. They had tried reminding him that there was so much to celebrate now that the Wizarding World was free.

They had tried, just like the Mind Healers, to tell him what he already knew, that Fred would have wanted him to live on. That Fred was watching over him, and now relying on him to carry on his legacy. But what he still didn't understand after hours of laying awake staring at the ceiling in the bedroom of the old dingy apartment he shared with his brother over their joke shop, was how he could do that when half of him was gone.

This morning, he didn't even know what has set him off. It was as though someone had placed him under the Imperius Curse. He had walked to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee before he had to go open the shop for the first customers of the day. And then he had done it, tried to Apparate downstairs, his mind still on the bubbling coffeepot he'd forgotten to turn off. He'd done it deliberately, he now realized. He had come to in a world of haze, and pain, and tears rolling down his cheeks, screaming his dead twin's name over and over and over. Fred, Fred, Fred!

And then his mother had been there, her face white as she bent over what was obviously only the top half of his body. And then they had been in St. Mungo's. After what seemed like countless people waving their wands over him when all he wanted was to be left alone, he had been whole again. And then he been placed here, stuck to the bed, alone. Alone with the memory of the Battle of Hogwarts, alone with the memory of finding his brother, dead, propped against a statue, alone with the memory of the funeral, and finally the memory of the bubbling coffeepot this morning that had spelled out what he knew he had to do.

He had thought that it would make it better, that making the pain physical by actually losing half of himself, would make it recede into the darkness. But only the smallest corner of his pain was gone, and the rest seemed magnified one thousand times. And now he realized, that grief wasn't a passing illness, as his family had tried to make it seem. It was a path, a journey, and most importantly a necessity. He also realized that while others could be there to support him comfort him, and give him a shoulder to lean on, this was the first journey in his life that he would have to go on alone.