Always Second Choice
Pairing: George Weasley x hufflepuff!reader
Summary: You're just trying to help your best friend get the boy she likes, but George Weasley keeps looking at you instead. Turns out the only person who doesn't know she's the one worth looking at is, is looking at her.
Warnings: no use of y/n
Cw: angst
Wc:2k+
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 (coming soon)
The bruise faded after four days.
You had decided, somewhere between day two and day three of pressing a cold cloth to your forehead, that you were done. Done with the plans, done with the problems, done with putting yourself in the path of someone who made your brain stop working at inconvenient moments.
You were going to tell Cecily it wasn't working. That she should just talk to him herself, directly, like a normal person. That you were done being the mechanism.
You had the whole speech prepared.
Then Cecily sat on the edge of your bed with her chin in her hands and said "please" in the small voice she only used when she actually meant it, and the speech dissolved.
"I just need one more push," she said. "Just one. He's so hard to read and I don't know if he's interested and you're so good at this stuff, you notice things, you always know—"
"Cecily—"
"Please." She looked at you with her big eyes and her genuine hope and you thought about how long you'd known her. First year. The vinegar barrel. Every bad day in between. "You're my best friend. You're the only one who actually helps."
You looked at the ceiling.
"Fine," you said.
She squealed and hugged you and you patted her back and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way George had said stop in the corridor like he was tired of a sentence, and the way your heart had done something very stupid about it, and you put both of those things away in the drawer you kept locked and decided firmly that your own feelings were not relevant here.
They had never been relevant.
Cecily needed you. That was what mattered.
You got out your notebook and wrote Operation Cecily at the top of a new page.
---
The plan, on paper, was perfectly reasonable.
You had made a list. An actual list, written small and neat in the back of your Potions notebook where nobody would find it, titled Operation Cecily in handwriting you'd immediately tried to make less embarrassing. Three stages. Clear objectives. Very little room for error.
Stage one: manufactured proximity. Meals near the Gryffindor table, study sessions in shared spaces, accidental corridor run-ins timed with Cecily conveniently nearby. Simple. Clean. Deniable.
Stage two: highlight Cecily's best qualities at every opportunity. Her laugh, her warmth, her very complete and total prettiness. Make George see what was already obvious to everyone else.
Stage three: step back and let nature take its course.
It was a good plan.
It started falling apart almost immediately.
---
Fred noticed a pattern before you'd even reached stage two.
He appeared at your library table on a Wednesday with a piece of parchment and a look of deep scholarly interest, sat down across from you without asking, and slid the parchment across.
On it he had written, in descending order:
The Matchmaking Plans of the Hufflepuff Girl, Ranked.
1. The library ambush (Week One) — Ambitious. Showed promise. Grade: Tragic. 2. The Herbology seating — Not your fault, technically. But you leaned into it. Grade: Embarrassing. 3. The Great Hall migration (ongoing) — She sits near us and stares at her food while Cecily chats up the wrong twin. Grade: Catastrophic.
You read it. "The wrong twin," you said.
"Cecily's been talking to me," Fred said pleasantly. "Not George. For three meals running. She laughs at all my jokes, which frankly is good taste but probably not helping your agenda."
You looked down the table. Cecily was indeed talking to Fred, touching his arm when she laughed, her face bright and beautiful and aimed in entirely the wrong direction.
He took your quill, added a fourth entry;
4. Whatever she tries next — God help her. Grade: Pending. He slid the parchment back. "Lee Jordan has a bet running, by the way."
You stared at him. "A bet on what."
"On how long before George stops being polite about all this." He stood, tucking the chair in. "The odds are before the end of the month. I personally said sooner." He straightened his robes. "Don't tell George I said any of this."
"Why not."
"Because he'd be annoyed that I find it funny." He smiled. "I find it very funny."
He left. You sat with the ranked list and felt, for the first time, genuinely stupid about the whole thing.
---
The study session was supposed to be clean and simple. Your table, Saturday morning, George and Cecily and you, proximity doing the work.
George arrived early. Of course he did. He sat across from you and for a few minutes it was just the two of you and the quiet scratch of quills and you keeping your eyes very carefully on your parchment.
"You don't have to keep doing this," he said, without looking up.
"Doing what."
"The setups." He turned a page. "I know what you're doing."
"I'm studying."
"You scheduled this and then told Cecily." He said it plainly. No accusation. "I know because Fred told me. Fred tells me everything eventually." A pause. "You don't have to keep doing it."
Your quill stopped moving. "She likes you."
"I know she does."
"So why—"
"Because liking someone isn't—" He stopped. Chose different words. "It doesn't work like that."
You looked at your parchment. The silence sat between you, careful and heavy.
"She's good," you said. "She's really good. If you just gave her a proper chance—"
"You're doing it again," he said softly.
You pressed your lips together. You knew what you were doing. You just couldn't stop.
Cecily arrived perfectly on time, green top, warm smile, and George smiled back and was perfectly kind and said all the right things, and you watched his face the whole time. The way his expression stayed pleasant but level. The way he answered her questions without leaning in. The way, ten minutes into the session, he asked you something about Transfiguration almost involuntarily, like he couldn't help it, like you were a gravity he kept falling toward without meaning to.
You answered. You always answered. And when you looked up his eyes were already on you and they had that look — the warm, certain, unhurried one and you looked back down at your parchment and felt the butterflies you weren't supposed to feel do something violent in your stomach.
Cecily's smile stayed perfectly in place the whole time.
---
George started sabotaging things somewhere around week three, though you didn't realise that was what he was doing at first.
The first sign was the accidental meeting you'd engineered in the corridor by the Charms classroom — Cecily coming from the left, George from the right, you having done the timing carefully. George arrived early, found you waiting alone, and stopped.
"What are you doing," he said.
"Nothing. I'm just standing here."
"You're standing here very specifically."
"I like this corridor."
"You hate this corridor. You said the torches flicker and it gives you a headache."
You had said that. Three weeks ago.
"I've changed my mind about the corridor," you said.
George looked at you for a moment. Then he said, "Let's go this way instead," and started walking down the left branch — the one Cecily was coming from — and you said "no, wait—" and grabbed the first thing you could reach, which was his tie, and pulled.
He stopped.
You had not planned to do that. Your hand was wrapped in the fabric of his Gryffindor tie, which meant you were close, suddenly, closer than you'd been since the Herbology bench, and he had turned back to look at you and the look on his face was not the usual amused one.
It was something quieter.
Something that made it very hard to remember what you had been trying to do.
"She's coming from that direction," you said. Quiet. Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "Just — wait. Please."
He looked at your hand on his tie. Then at your face. Something worked through his expression that you couldn't follow.
"Okay," he said, very softly.
You let go. Stepped back. Looked at the wall.
Cecily came around the corner thirty seconds later and her face lit up when she saw George and he was perfectly warm and perfectly friendly and said all the right things, and you stood slightly behind them both and watched it happen the way you always watched things happen and told yourself this was right. This was the point.
Later, Fred told you George had walked the long way to every class for a week to avoid the corridors you'd been timing.
"He's not making it easy for you," Fred said, not without sympathy.
"He's just busy," you said.
Fred looked at you like you were the saddest person he'd ever met.
---
George came back to the common room later than usual.
Fred was already there, feet up on the table, eating the last of a bag of Bertie Bott's with the relaxed energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this.
"How was the walk," Fred said, not looking up.
"Fine."
"Just fine."
"Just fine." George dropped into the armchair across from him and stared at the fire.
Fred ate a bean. Made a face. "Earwax." He put the bag down. "She redirected you to Cecily the whole way back didn't she."
"Three times," George said. "She mentioned Cecily three times in a ten minute walk."
"Classic." Fred folded his arms. "So. Cecily."
"What about her."
"She likes you."
"I know."
"She's pretty."
"I know."
"She's funny, warm, very easy to be around—"
"Fred."
"I'm just listing the facts." He shrugged. "Her friend has been working very hard for weeks to get you two in the same room. Multiple plans. Significant personal sacrifice. She headbutted a table over it."
"That wasn't—"
"It was related." Fred looked at him. "So why not just — try it. With Cecily. She's right there, she's keen, it would make everyone happy."
George was quiet for a moment. "Everyone."
"Her friend especially. That's clearly what she wants."
"I know what she wants." George's voice was even. "She wants me to like Cecily so she can go back to being invisible. So she can stand in the background and be useful and not have to think about the fact that someone might actually—" He stopped.
Fred watched him.
"She's decided she doesn't count," George said quietly. "That's the whole thing. She's so convinced that Cecily is the one people choose that she can't even — she won't even let herself consider anything else. So every time I'm near her she hands me straight to Cecily because that's the only version of this she believes in."
Fred was quiet for a moment. "And Cecily."
"Cecily's great," George said simply. "She's perfectly lovely. And I feel nothing."
"Nothing."
"Nothing." He turned his ring over on his finger. "I've tried, Fred. I've sat next to her, I've talked to her, I've given it a genuine chance because I thought maybe it would just — happen. Maybe it would make things simpler." He exhaled. "It doesn't happen. It's not her."
Fred looked at the ceiling. "This is deeply inconvenient."
"I'm aware."
"So what are you going to do."
"Probably give Cecily a last shot..Maybe I would change my mind about everything."
A/n: so how was this it??
Comment to be tagged on the next part!!
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