Look After You

Several hours after arriving at the shop, I threw myself onto the floor with my legs splayed out in front of me. I was almost entirely covered in paint (Fred and I had gotten in a "brush duel"), and my arms ached from the repetitive motion of brushstrokes. I yawned against my will and glanced at my watch. It was nearly ten o'clock.

Fred had gone down to The Leaky Cauldron to buy dinner for the three of us, but George and I remained behind, both too tired to move. He sat on the floor beside me and stared around at our handiwork, the hair on the right side of his head slathered with paint and standing on end. The purple-y-pink clashed gloriously with his natural flaming red, and I couldn’t help but chuckle softly.

"It looks great, don't you think?" He said, smiling wide.

"What, your hair or the shop?" I reached over to bounce my palm against the stiff, bristly, painted spikes. He reached his own hand up, tentatively, then shook his head.

"The shop, you idiot." He waved his arm in the direction of the furthest wall, which sported stripes of magenta and canary-yellow, "Can you picture it, Lace? Can you?"

"Ah, again, I'm not entirely sure what you mean." I peeled a dry spot of paint off my forearm.

George sighed and stood up, reaching for my hands so that he could pull me up, too. I bounced on the balls of my feet for a moment, then he threw his arm around my shoulders and began towing me around the room, gesturing as he spoke.

"Against this wall," He said, pointing at the wall with the stripes, "Will be the counter with the till, you know," He wheeled us around to face the wall to our right, "Here, all sorts of joke products. Fake wands and muggle tricks, Skiving Snackboxes. The whole lot, all the stuff we've been working on for ages. Over here," He turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to face the wall opposite us, "Some of the newer products we've been developing. A whole new line of stuff for girls, called Wonder Witch Products. Love potions and Guaranteed Ten Second Pimple Vanisher – that should sell well, I think – and here," We turned to face the windows, "Fliers, advertising everything. Bright colors and moving pictures, displays of our products. Maybe a muggle mannequin or two, wearing our Headless Hats and shield cloaks – those are new, too. Lacey, can't you see it?"

He stood there, beaming, holding his hand out in front of him with the fingers splayed. It actually was quite easy to imagine when he described it. He turned and grasped my upper arms, still grinning. Paint was smeared across his forehead, matted in his eyebrows and dried, mid drip, on the tops of his ears. He looked so earnest there in the dim light of a few lanterns. I smiled back and nodded, and he let out a jubilant yell, tugging me into his chest.

I stood frozen for a minute as his arms encircled my back, squeezing tightly. My face was pressed against his collar-bone, and I could hear the sound of the blood under his skin. I couldn't react, couldn't wrap my arms around him in return. I could only think things along the lines of what-is-going-on-here-I'm-not-entirely-sure-we've-ever-been-this-close-he-still-smells-like-apples-and-we're-nowhere-near-an-orchard.

He released me a second later, stammering a bit but still grinning.

"Well, Fred and I were thinking –" He began, scratching at the paint dried in his hair.

"We were thinking what?" Fred's voice interrupted from the doorway, following shortly after the ringing entrance-bell. He clutched a large paper sack in one hand and three bottles of butterbeer in the other. George and I jumped further away from each other and Fred grinned devilishly, "Sorry, didn't mean to catch you two mid-embrace. I can leave, you know, if you were going about something important."

"Shut it, you git." George snarled, the tips of his ears turning pink.

"Really." I glared at Fred myself.

He laughed and dropped onto the floor near us, beckoning for us to do the same. He took three magically-sealed bowls of stew and three generous cuts of bread from the depths of his bag and handed one to each of us along with a spoon. I sat there for a moment, quite befuddled because I couldn’t dip my spoon into the thick, brown soup. It froze just past the rim of the bowl. George raised his eyebrows at me and tapped the bowl pointedly with his wand. I did the same and began eating.

"So, wha' wuh we finkin'?" Fred asked, his mouth completely stuffed with bread.

George swallowed before he spoke, "Right, well, we were thinking that maybe, y'know, if you weren’t planning on living at home this year, you might –"

"Oh, right! I forgot we talked about that! Lacey, you should come and work with us, here." Fred interjected, looking around as if to demonstrate his point, "You could stay in the flat upstairs with us, or we could help you find a place of your own, and you could help us run the shop. It'd be great!" He looked so excited, I found myself blushing.

George was beaming, too, his filled spoon held halfway between his bowl and his mouth.

I decided to prolong the moment of agony before I gave my answer, opting instead to carefully lower my stew to the floor and gingerly brush the crumbs from the front of the sweater I was still wearing even though I'd just become aware that it was about nine-hundred-and-forty-eight degrees inside the shop. The Twins watched me, their smiles faltering a bit, clearly thinking that I would say 'no'.

In reality, it didn’t take me a very long time to mentally come to a decision. My parents were absolutely dying to move south to a little cottage they'd found on the beach and "Sorry, Lacey, but there is only one bedroom, and we didn't think you'd like it there, anyway." (My mother never really was one for subtlety). I'd been sort-of planning on finding a little flat for myself in some Wizarding community, anyway, and sharing one with Fred and George seemed like a decent, if not slightly frightening, idea. I kept my face smooth so they might think I was trying not to hurt their feelings, or something.

"Well, boys, that's a really generous offer," I said slowly, "And I'm pretty sure I'd really like to take you up on it, thanks."

"Brilliant!" They said in unison, resuming their meal. I did the same, tearing off bits of bread and popping them into my mouth.

"So, what was it like?" Fred said, wiping his mouth on the back of his arm, "The last day at Hogwarts?"

I thought for a moment, "Not as sad as I expected it to be. It was more like I was ready to go, but it wasn't like that for everyone, I guess. Angelina was in a right state, blubbering all over the place," I shrugged, "She wanted me to tell you both 'good-bye'."

Fred grinned, wide, and George rolled his eyes. It was basically common knowledge that Fred fancied Angelina. Everyone'd known after he asked her to the Yule Ball in sixth year. No one actually saw them at the dance, but rumors circulated that they had been out, snogging in the rose garden. Personally, I didn’t really doubt it.

I'm sure I looked quite dreamy, then, thinking about the Yule Ball. George and I had gone together, just as friends, of course. I would rather die than admit it publically, but I really loved wearing dress robes and looking dandy. George did nothing but complain all night, but it didn’t really matter. I quite enjoyed myself.

"Lacey, I think you're about to start drooling." George said, waving his hand in front of my face.

"I'm not," I blinked, "I'm just thinking."

"Can I use Herald?" Fred asked, pointing up into the rafters where my owl perched with his head facing the wrong way, "I want to send a letter to Angelina."

"Fine." I nodded.

"Oi, owl, come here." He said, snapping his fingers a few times. Herald just stared, his gold eyes blank.

"He's not stupid, Fred," I said, slapping his hand out of the air, "Herald, come on, now. Fred needs you for a while."

The owl swooped down and landed on my outstretched arm. I fed him a bit of bread and some meat from my stew while watching Fred warily as he dug through my trunk in search of parchment and a quill. He found what he was looking for and sat down to write, frowning in concentration.

The three of us (four if you include Herald) were silent for a while, splayed happily across the floor with stomachs full of stew and butterbeer. I liked the idea of nights like this, spending time with Fred and George after a long day of helping customers or whatever it was they were going to have me do. It would surely be a life of contentment, one that I could stomach while I waited for bigger and better things.

A few moments later, Fred had completed his letter and sent it off with Herald, and he and George led me through a door to the back store-room, where a set of stairs spiraled upward in the corner. We ascended, my trunk floating in front of us, and I found myself standing in the middle of what was clearly the most disastrous excuse for a flat in the history of Britain.

"Couldn't you have, well, done your experiments elsewhere?" I asked, pointing at large, black singe-marks covering the walls and ceiling. There were also cauldrons and boxes full of unrecognizable objects and mixtures on almost every flat surface. Robes and other articles of clothing were draped over the furniture, and I was almost sure that I saw a few live doxies flitting about inside a cage in the corner.

"Where else would you suggest?" Fred said sarcastically, "We couldn’t very well do them out in the streets, and Mum would skin us if we tried to do them back at the Burrow. You know how she is."

"Honestly, Lacey. Don't be so daft." George agreed, ruffling my hair.

The two of them set about clearing off what I hadn't known was a couch. The clothing and scraps of parchment and assorted cardboard boxes ended up piled on the floor beside my trunk, and the Twins looked rather pleased with their efforts. I flopped down across the cushions and yawned, kicking my shoes off as I did so.

"'Night, Lace." Fred said, nudging me with his knee.

"G'night, Lacey." said George, leaning down to cuff my shoulder lightly.

"'Night, Fred. 'Night, George." I snuggled my face into a throw pillow and fell asleep dreaming about George vomiting a waterfall of magenta paint while Fred yelled something about "I need you to write me a letter, Lacey! It's for Hermione, because she's mad at Dean!" and so on.

After spending the night exhausting myself with ridiculous dreams, I woke with a start, not entirely sure where I was. My neck hurt, and I was lying on my stomach, my eyes open to the floor. There was a rather large pair of shoes in my field of vision, and I turned my head slightly to see the person standing in them. It was Fred, grinning down at me with his wand in his hand.

"You look a bit mad," I muttered, sitting up and trying to rake my fingers through my hair (no avail, by the way), "Why're you grinning like that?"

"I look mad? Have you seen yourself? I'm grinning because I was just about to use Aguamenti to wake you up," He shrugged and stowed his wand, "But you woke yourself up before I could."

"Git." I yawned.

"Bathroom's around the corner. You look like you need a bath. Then hurry downstairs. We're unloading and stocking products, today. I left some employees' robes on the radiator in the hall." He rambled, counting his points off on his fingers. When I didn't move, he said, "Bloody hell, Lacey! Go on, get up! We've got a busy day, today. Don't make me fire you before you've even started." He grinned and dashed off toward the spiral staircase, leaving me alone in the room.

I stood and rummaged in my trunk for articles of clothing to wear under the "employee robes" Fred had mentioned, then meandered in the direction he'd pointed when talking about the bathroom.

I’d expected the tiny room to be equally as filthy as the rest of the flat, but I was quite surprised to see that it was actually quite tidy. Without looking in the mirror – mainly for fear that my reflection would frighten me into unconsciousness – I undressed and stepped into the shower. It took a while to get the paint out of my hair and off my skin, but I eventually succeeded in doing so and turned off the flow of water. Stumbling a bit in the small space, I managed to get myself toweled and dressed, then set out in search of the robes I'd been left.

They were the same color as the walls downstairs. I stared incredulously, lifting a piece of the heap of fabric with the tips of my fingers. They actually expect me to wear these. I thought the color was bad enough on the walls.

I shrugged and pulled them on over my head. They hung to the floor, and, looking down to inspect myself, I caught sight of my carrot-y hair clashing deliciously with the magenta uniform. I grimaced, then grinned, then set out for the spiral stairs.

"Fred, George," I sing-songed once I had arrived in the shop's back room, "I'm going to murder you both while you're sleeping." My tuneless warble carried through the doorway, and I saw them both turn around with frowns on their faces.

"Why?" George asked, appraising me as I entered the room.

I held my arms out pointedly, palm up as if to say 'why don't you tell me, you bloody idiot'.

"You look fine." Fred said, walking in a circle around me.

"Magenta?" I said, "Magenta? Why? You couldn’t possibly have picked a color that looks worse with red hair and, in case you'd forgotten, we're all in the same boat with that little genetic quality. I look like a bloody fool!"

They shrugged and returned to their work, waving their wands at stacks of sealed cardboard boxes. I sighed and joined in, magicking Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes onto the shelves that hadn't been there yesterday.