‹ Prequel: Look After You
Status: Complete.

You Found Me

Introduction

"Oy, Lacey. Come on, then. It's morning."

My pillow moved. Only, I suppose it wasn't actually my pillow because pillows don't usually move. Not to mention, this one in particular was a little too firm and smelled a whole lot like apples and the spicy-sweetness of magic experiments gone awry. I opened my eyes to slits. My carrot-colored hair hung completely over my face in a tangled curtain. With stiff fingers, I reached up to brush it aside, opening my eyes wide enough to see out the window just beside the bed.

"Bloody hell, it is morning, isn't it?" I croaked, snapping my eyelids shut and burying my face in my not-pillow.

"Indeed."

"Ah."

I lifted my head to gaze sleepily around the bedroom as I was often given to doing those days for reasons that I, myself, didn’t quite know. Perhaps it was the fact the I was truly content with my life for the first time in I didn’t know how long, and such a concept was so mind-boggling, I had to be sure it was real. Or, perhaps, I was only admiring the tidying I'd given the room the previouis night before bed. Whatever the reason, I remained propped on my elbows, staring around with a faint sense of bewildered ownership, as if I knew where I was but couldn’t understand how I'd gotten there.

The feeling remained until I glanced down at my not-pillow and noticed the freckles and the tousled hair that was almost the exact shade of my own.

Oh.

"You know you do that every morning?" George said, putting his hands behind his head and studying me with a look of mild interest. "Look around, I mean."

"I know." I yawned, sitting up and stretching my arms above my head. I immediately dropped them, though, because I couldn’t help but notice the distinct lack of pajamas on my body and I still wasn’t quite used to the whole we're-married-so-nudity-shouldn’t-be-a-problem thing.

George grinned, but didn’t say anything. He stretched and yawned, then swung his legs out of bed, already reaching for the wand he'd left on the night table. Before either of us could think about it, his discarded trousers from the night before were flying across the room and he was dressing. I hadn’t even moved, yet, and he was gazing out the window and scratching his bare stomach, his flaming hair standing out at odd angles. I smiled happily at him and he turned around.

"Would you make breakfast?" He patted his impossibly thin stomach and raised his eyebrows.

"Of course."

He grinned and advanced to kiss me once, then strode from the room without his shirt. I heard him thudding down the spiral staircase to the storeroom below.

I sat in the bed for a while longer and drew the blankets up around myself, staring out the window at the storefronts across the street. None of them were lit yet, and there were very few people strolling along, most of whom I recognized as owners and employees from the surrounding businesses. George and I were friendly with a few of them, though I couldn’t recall any of their names so soon after waking. I yawned so wide, my jaw popped.

I heard George rummaging through boxes the floor below in preparation for the morning rush. I heaved myself out of bed, dragging the blankets with me, and stumbled down the hallway outside the bedroom in the direction of the bathroom.

The flat had changed quite a lot in the six months or so since George and I had been married. There were no longer cauldrons full of unrecognizable substances or boxes full of unfinished products scattered around the kitchen and living room. There were pictures hung on the walls, some of which moved, some of which did not. I passed a stationary photo of myself with my parents, taken the last time I'd seen them – roughly three and a half months earlier – without even really looking. I knew that, in it, I stood between the two them, though neither of them touched me in any way. There was no fatherly arm around my shoulders, no motherly hand on the arm. Mum and Dad were hardly even smiling. They hadn’t been too pleased about my marriage, come to find out. While things had been strained between us before, they were even worse now.

A few feet further down the hall, there was a moving picture of George and I, laughing and holding hands while on our honeymoon in Barcelona. (The city had an entire Wizarding quarter, who knew?) Beneath that one was another animated photo. I stopped and stared at it for a minute. In this one, I was sixteen and laughing, standing between my two best friends, one of whom I ended up married to, the other who I missed so much, it made my chest hurt sometimes. Tearing my eyes away, I walked into the bathroom and shut the door, leaving the bed sheets on the hallway floor.

I, myself, had changed only subtly and superficially since July 1998. I studied my reflection while waiting for the shower water to heat up. My hair was still mid-spine in length and carrot orange in color. The freckles that dotted my face were faded from lack of summer sun, but they were still there, sprinkled across the bridge of my nose and dusted liberally over my limbs and torso. When George and I were next to each other in the middle of the night, it was sometimes hard to tell whose skin was whose.

The bathroom was filling with steam, and I tore my gaze away from the mirror before stepping under the stream of hot water.

A few minutes later, when I was thoroughly prune-y and smelling quite nice, I turned the shower off and toweled myself dry. With a tiny feeling of self-exasperation, I realized that I hadn’t brought any clothes into the bathroom with me. Wrapping myself in one of our fluffy white towels (a practical wedding present from Mr. And Mrs. Weasley) I left the bathroom, stepping over the pile of sheets I'd left on the floor.

George was standing in the kitchen, his mouth stuffed with something that crunched when he chewed.

"I said I'd make breakfast." I said, pausing in the bedroom doorway.

George stopped chewing and raised his eyebrows at me, a corner of his mouth screwing up while he drew his eyes over my freshly washed semi-nakedness. He swallowed.

"I was hungry." He ran his hand through his hair and his smile grew.

"And you couldn’t wait ten minutes?" I turned and went into the bedroom, dropping my towel and dressing myself in articles of clothing from the folded pile next to the wardrobe.

"No." He said, and he was chewing again.

"Bloody prat." I said, reaching for my wand, which had been left on the bureau the night before. George leaned against the doorframe while I used the stick of holly and demiguise hair to dry my hair.

"Twit."

"Idiot."

"Housewife."

I winced, and he grinned widely. I tied my hair back in a loose, tangled knot, then reached for my set of pink Weasley's Wizard Wheezes employee robes and one of George's shirts because he still wasn't wearing one. He caught it when I tossed it to him, then pulled it down over his torso, still smiling at me.

"I stocked this morning," he said, entering the room and rummaging through the wardrobe for his own robes. "So you don't have to do it."

I stopped pulling the robes on and narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously. "What do you want?"

I bloody hated stocking shelves, and he knew it perfectly well. With only the two of us working the shop, though, there was no one else to do it. Therefore, there was no way around doing it myself. He must've wanted something.

George didn’t say anything, just walked past me with a pause to kiss the corner of my mouth. He left the room and tromped down the spiral staircase. I followed, dropping my robes so that they hung almost to the floor. My engagement ring caught on a violently pink thread, and I stared down at it, absent-mindedly pulling the sting free while walking through the curtained doorway between the storeroom and the main shop. George was standing behind the counter, grinning at the crowd gathered on the street in front of number ninety-three, Diagon Alley. He turned his smile on me.

Oh my God, I'm married.

A fat woman with a large, furry hat knocked on the front window and pointed at her watch.

George said, "Are you ready?" like he did every morning.

I plastered a 'can I help you' smile on my face, nodded, and braced myself against the tsunami that had become my daily life.

It felt like I was simply born to do it.
♠ ♠ ♠
This introduction is lame, I promise it'll get better.
Fun fact, I wrote this in a notebook on a highway somewhere between Charleston, SC and Richmond, VA on a roadtrip almost four years ago.

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