Because I - George Weasley

15: Because I Was Alone

Sunday morning I woke up with someone pressed against my back. There was an arm wrapped around my chest and another holding me from under my neck. I gasped and pulled myself away, falling off the common room couch and almost onto Lee's head.

I grabbed at my neck, checking for wounds. Then at my chest. Then back at my neck feeling something wet dripping down towards my chest.

"What's going on? Why are you on the floor?" asked George, in a 'I just woke up' voice. He looked at me a little closer and a look of worry washed over his face. "Why are you crying?"

I took a few deep breaths and scanned the common room, trying to get my boundaries.

Fred was asleep across the top of the couch in some kind of impossible balancing act, the butterbeer cake on the table by his head and the loud snores pouring out of his throat like an animal. Lee was lying on the floor next to me in a ball, one of the common room blankets wrapped around him like a burrito.

George was laying on the couch where I'd just been, startled and his arms now empty.

"Winters?" he asked, flailing around to try and sit up in front of me. He reached out to touch my face, trying to wipe away the tears streaming d0wn my face, but I swatted his hand away on impulse. "Hey, I'm sorry."

He was still doing his best to wake up, wiping the sleep out of his eyes and trying to cough the tired out of his voice.

I wiped away the tears away myself and stood, trying to straighten my clothes.

"I need to write Remus," I told him, grabbing my rucksack at the end of the couch and finding my wand on the window sill I'd been sitting on the night before.

"Winters," said George, following me out the portrait hole.

I turned for a second to seem him struggling to take off the tie he'd fallen asleep in. It was twisted around his neck and the knott had gotten tighter as he slept.

"I don't think you're making it better," I told him.

He looked up from his tug of war game and frowned. He looked defeated and worried out of his mind.

I checked the surrounding passageways to see if anyone else was around, but we were alone at seven in the morning on a sunday. So, I slowly walked towards him and pulled his hands away from the tie to help him untie it without making it any tighter.

Before I could back away, the tie dangling on either side of his neck, he took my hands.

"I'm sorry, Winters. If I overstepped my boundaries, I'm really sorry."

I shook my head and pulled my hands away.

"It's not your fault," I said, forcing a smile. "I'll see you later, okay?"

He didn't argue, but he didn't more to leave either. He ran a nervous hand through his hair and dropped his head to look at the floor.

Quickly, before him or I could comprehend my actions, I wrapped my arms around his waist and buried my head into his shoulder in a short but tight hug, before I pulled away and made my way down the marble staircase and towards the owlery without looking back at him.

There I pulled a notebook out of my bag and started to draft an impossible letter to Remus. The first couple times I wrote the letter out I talked about how I'd only entered to piss off my sister. Scraped that to talk about how I knew he'd be mad that I entered, but I was excited to compete, but I knew that that was a lie, so I dropped that one as well.

It took over an hour for me to get my thoughts under control so I could write a genuine letter to my godfather.

Dear Remus,