Love Isn't Easy: A Fred Weasley Story

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

            I woke up the next morning really early for some reason.  Stretching, I sat up and realized something extremely odd; I had fallen asleep on the couch with Fred.  Then what was I doing in one of the dormitory beds: a bed, mind you, in a boys dorm.  Looking around the still-dark room, I noticed one ginger and one dread-locked head in two of the other beds.  So that meant Fred had brought me into his dorm once I had fallen asleep because he couldn’t get into the girls’ dorm.

            Tiptoeing out the door and down the stairs so as not to wake anybody, I made my way into the common room.  Fred was sprawled out on his back on the sofa we had been on last night, snoring softly.  I looked down at him fondly and covered him with the blanket that had fallen off of him sometime in the night.  I curled up on the armchair next to the sofa with my book once again and read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson until other people started stirring.

            After that first night, things went back to normal, or as normal as life gets when your best friends are the Weasley twins.  The only difference was that I had to put up with Angelina a little more often.  The boys and I played the occasional prank on Filch and sometimes even Snape, but most of their time was dedicated to hoodwinking Dumbledore’s age line around the Goblet of Fire.  They had decided on a simple aging draft, and I wasn’t completely convinced it was going to work.  “You two DO know that something so simple and mundane is never going to work, right?” I argued with Fred and George as I followed them down the hall to where the Goblet of Fire was kept.

            “It’ll work Love, don’t you worry about it,” Fred smiled, looking at me over his shoulder.

            I smirked and cocked an eyebrow at him, “Wanna bet, Weasley?”

            “Sure Black.  What are the stakes?” He smiled crookedly, stopping and spinning around to face me.  Not expecting the sudden stop, I ran into his chest.

            I looked up at him, thinking.  “How about the usual?”

            “Loser becomes the winner’s slave for a day?  You’re on!”  

            As it turns out, I wasn’t the only person who was leery about the aging potion.  Hermione tried reasoning with Fred and George explaining that someone as powerful as Dumbledore wouldn’t be fooled by an aging draft.  Being the stubborn fools they are, the two refused to see sense and went along with their plan anyway as the room full of students, myself included, looked on in fascination. 

            “Ready Fred?”

            “Ready George?”

            “Bottoms up!”  And with that, the two drank their aging draft and hopped inside the perimeter of the age line.  I was shocked as nothing seemed to happen.  Fred and George put their names into the Goblet and all seemed well until suddenly the flames shot out and threw the twins across the hall.

            “You said!”

            “You said!”

            And with that the twins were wrestling with each other surrounded by a crowd of students shouting and whooping for a fight.  I shoved my way through the throng of students until I was near the twins.  As I pulled my fighting best friends off of each other the hall grew silent.  Everyone else was distracted from the spectacle we made by Viktor Krum entering the hall in order to enter his name in the Goblet. 

            “Will.You.Two.Stop.This.NONSENSE?!?!” I groaned at the twins, still trying to pry them apart.  It was then that I got a good look at the two of them and what I saw caused me to collapse in a fit of giggles.  Both Fred and George had sprouted identical fluffy white beards and matching Einstein hair to boot.