imagine that | harry potter imagines

shadows on the bedroom ceiling (fred weasley x fem!reader)

description: the reader struggles to sleep alone after Fred's death.

warnings: death, grief, loss of a loved one, angst

(a/n: first fred fic (probs more a blurb though lets be real), let me know what you think :))

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The bedroom ceiling has become her best friend. She's all too acquainted with its chips and peeling paint, with the shadows that dance across it from the gap in the curtain and how they never still throughout the night.

It knows her too, far better than most. Its witness to her vulnerability in a way no one ever has been before, no one except the person whose absence has stolen her sleep to begin with, has caused all her tears each night.

A month without Fred Weasley has been a nightmare to all who loved him. One of them many lives stolen too soon by a war that should never have been theirs to fight, he left so much behind; a grieving family, a broken twin brother and a fading indent in the mattress where he used to sleep.

Every night, (Y/N) runs her fingers across it and forces herself to remember when he was there, the early morning rises spent barely awake, mumbling to one another as the sun crept through the curtains and spilled across the room, the late nights spent with her head on his chest, listening to his quiet snoring and finding comfort in the rise and fall of his chest.

She finds herself missing the habits she used to hate, the way he would hog covers on the coldest winter evenings but radiate heat like a burning furnace during the summer, how each night he would fight sleep like a child on new years eve, chatting nonsense to her until his words faded into the silence of sleep. If he were here though, to ramble shamelessly through her attempts at sleep, she'd stay awake to cling to each word, to engrave the exact gravelly edge to his sleepy voice in her mind.

But his side of the bed lies empty as it has since her and George's return from the burrow, where each day was filled with enough loving distraction to exhaust her into a restless sleep through the night. Now though in a bed that they used to call theirs, his absence is felt everywhere, his untouched pillows, the wilting flowers on the bedside table and his old jumper flung across the chair at the foot of the bed.

No tossing and turning ever saves her, her battle for sleep is always lost. She can only turn back to the ceiling and thank it for its company, searching for sense of peace in its dancing shadows and peeled paint that never comes. And so she waits with her eyes wide open for the emptiness of his absence to find her too, to envelope her in the same stillness it has his pillows and his dip in the mattress.