summary: first day back at hogwarts and george weasley is fine. completely fine. he is absolutely not thinking about angelina johnson.
The Hogwarts Express had barely cleared the station before Fred Weasley declared it officially open season.
"Right," he said, dropping into the seat across from George and Lee, unwrapping a Cauldron Cake like he was calling a meeting to order. "New year. Fresh eyes. Let's discuss."
Lee didn't even look up from his Quidditch Weekly. "Discuss what."
"Which girls came back different."
"Different how."
"Different different." Fred gestured broadly at nothing. "You know. Summer, different."
"That's not a thing."
"It is absolutely a thing. Fourth year was when Rosmerta Evans in Hufflepuff came back with—"
"I remember," Lee said, finally looking up.
George leaned his head against the window and watched the countryside blur past. His curls were getting long again, falling over his forehead in the way his mum always tried to fix with spit on her thumb, which he'd been successfully dodging for three weeks. The sky outside was that particular shade of grey that meant it was still technically summer but the world had already given up on it.
He was fine. He was completely fine.
He was not thinking about Angelina Johnson.
He was also not thinking about the way she'd looked at the Leaky Cauldron two weeks ago when their families happened to cross paths, and how her hair had been done differently, and how she'd smiled at him with her whole face the way she always did, and how he'd said hi back like a completely normal person and then immediately walked into a display of Fizzing Whizzbees.
Completely fine.
They spotted the girls at the pitch.
It was tradition, or something close enough to it. First day back, before the sorting feast, before everything got loud and supervised again, there was always an hour where the older students drifted out to the Quidditch pitch the way birds knew to fly south. No brooms. No practice. Just the pitch, and the last of the good light, and the particular relief of being back somewhere that wasn't home but felt like it anyway.
The Gryffindor girls were already there when Fred, George, and Lee came through the stands. Angelina was running drills, even without a broom, because she was Angelina, and that was the kind of thing Angelina did. Alicia was watching her with the expression of someone who deeply respected that kind of dedication and also deeply did not share it. Katie was eating crisps on the bottom row of the bleachers.
"Oi," Fred said, mostly to himself, watching Angelina land from a practice jump and jog back to her starting point. "Did she get taller?"
"Don't," Alicia said, from thirty feet away, without looking.
"I'm just observing."
"Don't observe."
George said nothing. He had, in fact, noticed the same thing approximately four seconds ago, which was exactly why he was now looking at a spot approximately six inches above Angelina's head and thinking very hard about Quidditch statistics.
She had gotten taller. Or maybe it was just the way she was standing, that same straight-backed way she had, like she was always ready to launch herself into the air. She was wearing her hair down over her shoulders in thick braids, a few of them pinned back from her face, and she moved the way she always moved, like she was annoyed at gravity for the inconvenience of it.
"Amazonian goddess," Lee said, very quietly, in the tone of a man having a private religious experience.
"She's not that tall," Fred said.
"She's taller than me," Lee said.
"She's taller than you because you're short."
"I'm average."
"You are below-average."
George put his hands in his pockets. "Can we go down now."
They went down.
"Angelina," Fred said, pointing at her with the easy confidence of someone who had never once been embarrassed by anything in his life. "Did you get taller? Because I think you got taller."
Angelina turned and gave him the look she reserved specifically for Fred — somewhere between fond and deeply tired. "Hello to you too, Weasley."
"I notice things," Fred said. "It's actually a gift."
"It's something," Alicia said, stepping neatly between them. "Hi George. Hi Lee." She pointed at Fred. "You, back up."
Fred backed up, grinning, entirely unbothered.
Lee immediately started talking to Alicia about something George didn't catch because Angelina had turned to him, and she was smiling, and his brain did the thing it always did these days which was briefly forget how to work.
"Hey," she said. "How was your summer?"
"Good. You know. Mum yelled at us, Fred blew something up, Ron cried about it." He paused. "Percy also cried, actually. Separately."
Angelina laughed. "What did Fred blow up this time?"
"The gnome hutch. Which, for the record, was Percy's fault."
"How."
"Percy bet us we couldn't enchant a gnome to sing the school song." He said it like that explained everything, because it did.
"And the hutch."
"Casualty of science." He nodded seriously. "Very tragic. We held a small service."
She was grinning now, shaking her head, and it occurred to George, not for the first time, that she was one of the only people he knew who actually let herself laugh at things instead of performing it. Like she wasn't checking how it looked. Just laughing.
He looked back at the pitch.
"You were drilling," he said. "Before we got here."
"Trying to sort out my approach angle." She turned to look at the pitch too, and for a moment they were just standing side by side, looking out at it. "I kept going wide on my cuts last year. Been thinking about it all summer."
"You think about Quidditch all summer?"
"Don't you?"
"Mostly I think about how to convince Mum to buy us better brooms and fail."
"Same difference."
George smiled at his shoes. He could feel Lee, from somewhere to his left, having what was probably a very normal conversation with Alicia while also definitely watching Angelina in his peripheral vision. George could not explain why he found this annoying given that it was not his business.
He found it annoying.
"Wood's going to run you lot into the ground this year," he said.
"Probably." She didn't sound upset about it. "That's fine. I'd rather be run into the ground and win."
"Very noble."
"Very practical." She glanced at him sideways. "You and Fred trying out again?"
"Is that a real question."
"Right." She smiled. "Stupid question."
"Deeply stupid question. We're offended."
"My sincerest apologies to you and Fred collectively."
"I'll pass it along. He'll want it in writing."
"He can want a lot of things."
George laughed, and she laughed too, and the evening light was doing something to the pitch, going gold and long-shadowed the way it only did at the very end of summer, and he was aware that this was a nice moment, standing here, talking to her. He was aware of it the way you were aware of something you weren't supposed to touch. Carefully. From a slight distance.
He put his hands back in his pockets.
"Come on," Fred called, from somewhere behind them. "Feast in twenty. Lee's trying to smuggle that magazine in under his robes and I want to watch McGonagall take it off him at the door."
"I'm not smuggling anything," Lee said.
"He's absolutely smuggling it," Fred said, to no one in particular.
Angelina rolled her eyes and turned toward the stands to collect her bag. "Same as ever," she said, mostly to herself, but fond. Like it was a good thing.
George fell into step with the group and let Fred start an argument about the magazine and didn't say anything else, just walked, the pitch going dark behind them, the school lit up ahead.
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