oscines
pairing: george weasley/neville longbottom
word count: 2,437
for the @hpqueernet favourite queer ship event
“Neville,” George gasps, the sweat dripping from his forehead, his eyes screwed shut, “ah, fuck, Neville-”
George finds Neville sitting in the kitchen in the morning: Neville’s house isn’t exactly something he had paid much attention to before, but it’s sweet. Plants line every windowsill and many stand proud on the floor, some singing as he walks past, dancing on their stalks. Everything seems to have a warm hue to it, furniture in streaks of orange and green, and Neville’s loose knit jumper is no exception. He blends in to his house, deeply ingrained in it as if he is its living breathing heart.
He looks up from his mug of tea as George walks in. The loose knit is too loose, and the jumper too large, and George can see his collarbone where it slides off, the red marks he left on Neville’s soft skin. He runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t know what emotion necessitated it.
“Please don’t say something about how you regretted it,” says Neville, “because I enjoyed it, and I haven’t - I just haven’t felt safe like that in so long. And I know you regret it but I just want to let myself believe that something is okay.”
“What makes you think I regret it?” George asks. Neville’s knuckles go white, then he slackens them again, quite unsure of what to do with his limbs, his reaction unsteady through him. He looks like he might cry for a second.
“Haven’t you heard all those people saying that we’re each other’s - pity projects?”
“And what does that mean?”
Neville’s mouth moves for a moment as if moving to explain, and then he licks his bottom lip in thought, and then gives up on the process entirely in favour of setting his tea down. “I don’t know. Am I your pity project? Am I supposed to make you feel - better?”
George laughs, but not unkindly, cracking open a window and lighting a cigarette. Foul habit, he knows, but the tang just seems to take him through moments he might not manage unguided. Neville doesn’t like it, nor do his plants, but George doesn’t like Neville’s self-deprecation either and that’s never stopped him. “I mean, you make me feel better. I feel better when I’m around you. But that’s because we’ve been working our arses off trying to get better, and helping each other, not for anything else. Maybe we are each other’s project, but I’m not here because I feel sorry for you. I’m here because you feel like shit, and I feel like shit, and we’ve been through some shit, and you’re one of the few people who just understands that. I don’t regret anything except that I didn’t take you out to a nice dinner or something first.” George coughs on his cigarette for a moment and wonders if it’s a sign. “Merlin, Neville, you have no idea how much that meant to me.”
“Maybe I do,” says Neville. George looks over his shoulder and raises his eyebrows. Neville is chewing on one of his fingernails, which is another habit George is not fond of, but they’re both full of bad habits. They’re both just waiting to find the strength to break out of them. George thinks they’re getting there. “I never really had anyone else to speak to about this. Harry and that lot, well… when they went out, you know, they didn’t want to hear about it. And I understand that, but there was no one to say I really need some help to until you.” Neville smiles a little at some thought he’s having, lets out that noise that’s between a breath and a giggle. “I felt so bad that night, unloading all of that onto you, because you had so much going on yourself, but…”
“I mean, Flamel’s sake, Neville, I was so happy to finally hear somebody else’s problems! I was stuck with my own and nobody would be honest to me because they all thought I was too bad myself, and there was that point where I just wanted to scream and say it’s fine that we’re all big messes right now, and then, of course, you happened.”
Neville smiles. “I regret so many things I said to you and some of the things I did, but… I don’t regret you.”
George has to stifle his own grin in his shirt, because he loves it when Neville says that, just loves it. Most of the time he feels like somebody’s depressed brother, the wrong half of a whole, a person who still has to be spoken about in awkward whispers. But Neville has never thought so. He knows what it’s like.
The singing rose on the windowsill is whistling up at him, and George thumbs one of its petals, and wonders why he’s never let himself be here before.
He is scared of commitment, true. Scared of definites and absolutes and things that could go wrong and things that don’t last forever.
He is not scared of Neville.
George is scared of truths, he discovers.
“Sometimes,” he says, “when I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself, I see Fred, and I let myself believe that it isn’t a mirror, and that he’s standing there. And he’s in my dreams, all of them, because he always has been, and so I can’t say that he’s dead and have it ever feel real, but last night I dreamt without him and it felt like someone cut the last cord between us. And now when I look in the mirror all I see is myself and he’s gone and I have never let myself accept the truth that he is dead because I’m scared of it and what it means for me because I don’t know how to live on my own, Neville. I don’t know who I am without the other part of me and I’ve just been pretending and the truth is fucking here and I can’t keep pretending but I want to, I want to, I don’t know how I can live in this world when it’s all so real, and…”
Neville is tempered, waits and listens, lets George rock on the floor of his house with his hands over his eyes and his feelings like an oil spill between them. He draws little shapes on George’s back, and George slowly lets his hands drop, lets Neville see his tear stained face and his bloodshot eyes because, he supposes, this too is a truth.
“And I am absolutely in love with you and I’m too scared to say it because I think I’m going to drag you down with me and Merlin, you deserve better.”
Neville waits a moment, sits, lets that digest; his eyes shift, and the edges of his mouth tug softly. “There’s a species of magical plant,” he says, “that cycles through all the seasons in just a day. So in the morning it’s spring and blossoms and it stands proud and tall in the afternoon for summer and then goes red in the evening and sheds all its leaves at night. But then in the morning again, it’s blossoming.” He reaches out, touches George’s face for just a moment, feeling the patterns of smooth and bumpy that are becoming familiar to him. “You’ve always known these things,” he says eventually, and George would argue, but of course, Neville is right.
The truths are not new. He just reads them like they are because suddenly they seem truer, fresh again.
But it doesn’t make him hurt any less, and he knows that, and Neville knows that, too. George catches his breath again, follows Neville’s own.
“I did say I love you,” he says eventually. “That is - that’s true. Maybe it’s the easiest truth to say.”
There is something so unnameably spectacular about Neville sometimes; not just in the moments where he’s sitting calmly and George can count the moles on his arms, but more so when he’s taking the world head on again. The shine of his sweet smile when he’s talking to Molly, the way he holds his mouth tightly in concentration when he’s casting his housework spells, the sound of his laugh when it’s genuine and unbridled. Neville even dances sometimes, when he thinks no one is watching, listens to the Weird Sisters and lets himself go for a minute at a time. No more than that, of course. George knows better than most people that Neville is never quite off edge. He had held Neville’s hand when they had lowered the wards on his windows, though he still has magic strong enough to give George a headache at the front door.
George stirs his cold coffee thoughtlessly, watching the early crowd of shoppers out of his window. He isn’t opening today, and is giving himself an hour or two before he goes into the shop. He is instead letting himself think and entertain an idea that he knows is completely preposterous and yet is totally enamoured by.
He reheats his coffee, finishes the dregs, throws his coat on and apparates out of the house.
Harry Potter does not seem particularly used to surprise visits, and knocks over a whole row of the Black family’s ornaments when George arrives; he swears, and mutters “reparo”, though much to George’s amusement, none of them seem to quite look the same even when he puts them back on the mantel. Harry rubs his forehead. “Jesus Christ, George, most people knock.”
“Yeah, well, you said it there. Most people. I’m one of the least people. Harry, do you ever clean your mirrors?”
“With that amount of effort, you might as well just blow the dirt off.” George plucks his wand from his belt, spins it round in his hand a moment before bellowing “scourgify!”. This, of course, does the trick perfectly, and the mirror almost shines as it shakes off its layer of filth. “Wow, I look great today.”
“You are looking better,” Harry notes, leading George through the dark corridors and to the dining room, where he hangs his coat up and runs his fingers across the peeling wallpaper. “Are you actually going to tell me why you’re here or are you just going to make me feel guilty for being a bad homeowner?”
“You can let this place rot, for all I care,” George says, then trips his tongue over the thought a few times before allowing himself to finally say it: “would it be ridiculous if I asked Neville to marry me?”
“Yes,” says Harry, immediately, then, “wait, you guys are dating?”
“How did you not know? We were the talk of the bloody Burrow for about two months! It’s not every day you get a gay wizarding couple with quite the amount of cumulative trauma we have.” George rests a hand on his hip. “Wow. Wow.”
“You really want to marry him this soon?”
“Without giving you a very soppy speech about it, yes.”
“Why don’t you ask Neville?”
George sighs. “I don’t want to ruin things. If he doesn’t take it well, and doesn’t want to see me any more, then…”
“If you think Neville would leave you just because you wanted to get married and he didn’t,” Harry says, “are you sure you know him?”
That, George thinks, is a very good point. Not that he shouldn’t marry Neville, of course; George is still caught up in that thought, but he’s doing the thing he should never do and giving too much credence to irrational fears. There are no Death Eaters coming for them, the war will not happen again, buildings will not crumble at their foundations and swallow them whole, Fred is not trapped in George’s dreams, Neville would never stop talking to George because a marriage proposal went badly.
He looks at Harry, not quite sure what to say.
“Just go ask him and stop looking at me,” Harry says.
(“My gran will throw a fit,” says Neville, throwing his arms round George;
“So will my mum,” he laughs, burying his grin in Neville’s shoulder.)
Fred appears again in George’s dream, a fully-formed thing; they’re somewhere in Hogwarts, in a secret corridor that’s an amalgamation of reality and imagination, one covered in portable swamps and all sorts of magical mishaps. Fred is waving his wand, casting little sparks about them, looking younger than George does now. He always was the more mischievous of the two. George is probably thinking himself into grey hairs.
“Didn’t we turn him into a canary?” Fred asks.
“Yeah,” says George. “He made a cute bird.”
“You know, canaries used to be popular among old Muggle kings in England and Spain,” Fred says, sniffing and twisting his nose comically, in that way that he and George would always do behind peoples’ backs to make them laugh. George resists a snort. “Because of their beautiful songs. Hermione told me that.” He groans. “I can’t believe I bloody remember that. You’re meant to be the brains.”
George laughs. “The canaries were your idea in the first place.”
“Oh, clearly I have an affinity with the bird. I, too, am colourful and love a good song. Always trust a canary.” Fred beams, looking as proud as the day he first apparated; or maybe as proud as the day they first tricked Filch.
George nips out of the party, stands in the back garden, in the shade of The Burrow. The summer heat is incredible, and he undoes a button of his shirt, eases off his dress robes til he’s just in ruffled shirt and trousers. There’s a breeze rippling through the air, but a warm one, not quite enough still to cool him off.
He would’ve asked Neville back here with him, but Neville seems to be making himself at home among the family. So he supposes he’ll treasure the moment alone.
He takes out his wand, always close at hand, and runs it across his palm for a moment.
He shifts it between his fingers, holds it, lets his breath steady. He is moving on, he thinks, taking this step forward. The past isn’t gone but he asks it to stop haunting him all of his waking moments, and with an elegant swish, he casts:
And from his wand bursts forth light, and in his mind he captures Neville’s smile, shy like the first time he saw it, gentle in the light; and from the trees, the sound of birds, singing through the branches.
