Because I - George Weasley

12: Because I Couldn't Help

"I'm coming in!"

"No, you're not!"

"Wanna bet?"

It was a fight of strength. Me against Fred and Lee.

"George, hurry up!" Lee grunted.

"No!" I cried through the door. "You're going to blow yourself up!"

"It's your potion!" said George from deep inside the boy's dormitory. "If it blows me up, that's on you!"

"Let us do this, Winters!" said Fred.

"No! It's a bad idea. Dumbledore drew the age line himself. It's not going to be fooled by a stupid age potion. You're going to get yourselves in trouble if you don't die first."

"We need this, Winters!" said Fred, the playful fighting tone suddenly gone from his voice and the pressure against the door dropped by half.

"Fred!" cried Lee, letting go of the door as well. "You can't just leave me like that."

I fell through the now open door and onto the messy floor of the twins' and Lee's dorm.

"Let me know if you're going to stop fighting next time," I groaned, scooping myself up from the floor. I look a quick mental map of dorm layout.

It was just as messy as I thought it might be. The instinct of a teenage boy is to make things as messy as possible, after it. Though the mess made it almost impossible to tell where the floor was at some parts, it was still easy for me to tell the four-poster of each boy.

Muggle football players and famous African American athletes decorated Lee's area of the room. His family displayed on his night stand and his muggle clothes sprawled across the foot of his bed.

Fred had a picture of him and all of his siblings pinned above his headboard and his satchel laying open atop his trunk. Inside no books spilled out, but piles of trick sweets and blueprints for their next pranks. That's part of the reason I knew it was his over George's.

George was just as messing, but his mess mainly consisted of potions books and ingredients and things that proved his intelligence rivalled his twins and won by a long shot. He was the brains of the operation. Fred might have been more charismatic, but he's never let you know that he may have been good at transfiguration but the simplest potions would stump him.

I forced my attention away from the boy's beds and onto the display of stolen ingredients and bubbling cauldron in the middle of the floor.

George was hunched over it, forcing his brain to remember the potion I'd forced into him the night before.

"You don't understand what it's like," George muttered, dropping the wooden spoon he was using to stir the potion. "What it's like to see your family struggle every year to put your siblings through school and then have to be another burden as soon as you're added into the situation. You could never understand."

I snorted a laugh and sat cross-legged in front of George and the potion.

"I don't not wear a cloak when it's cold because I think it makes me look tough. I do it because I don't own a cloak. Never have."

A look of sudden guilt was passed between the boys.

"Everything I own is thirty, forty, a hundred and forty years old. Everything I own is what they found in the house my mother died in. Things that got moved from there to the orphanage I live in. I know what it's like to need money. I promise you that. This isn't the way to get it."

Fred let out a loud sigh and plopped down next to me. He wrapped a long arm around me and much to my disagreement forced me into a hug.

"You know we know you care about us and you know we care about you too, Winters. Never would have thought you were any kind of poor. That's just another reason you're cooler than anyone thinks. You just push through all of the crap in life."