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"Harry?" George asked blearily, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He had to wonder if he was dreaming when he'd heard his almost-boyfriend's voice calling through the flat. Harry was meant to be at Hogwarts, not there in the flat he shared with Harry's ex-boyfriend (and George's own twin).
"I…" Harry began, but he trailed off as words seemed to completely fail him. The messy-haired boy stood there with his mouth opening and closing, resembling a fish for a moment.
George ended up just wrapping his arms around Harry and pulling him close to his chest. He was all too aware of what day it was and so he didn't need any further explanation from him - but he did think that it was careless of Harry to be out of the castle and this far away from Dumbledore. Even though the man was not George's favourite, he would have been a fool to believe that there was anyone else better suited to protecting Harry from You-Know-Who who was still at large.
He pressed a kiss to the top of Harry's head and out of instinct he rocked him from side to side very gently. It felt very patronising, but Harry didn't protest at all and just leaned his head against George's chest. They stood there in the tiny living room/kitchen space for a while, not saying anything and George didn't feel that they had to say anything either.
When Harry finally stepped away from him, George silently took in the boy's disheveled appearance and how he somehow looked years older than he actually was. He didn't look awful, just aged but it was enough to worry George. He didn't know what was going on at school; Harry was extremely vague in his letters, but then George supposed he had to be.
George watched Harry as he fell backwards onto one of the armchairs, those green orbs of his meeting George's gaze.
"He's… He's not a good man, is he?"
Harry's question burned through the air between them. George didn't know what that meant, who Harry was talking about, but he supposed that he could hazard a guess.
"Who?" He asked anyway before he could make a verbal assumption and sound like a complete idiot.
"Dumbledore." Harry's voice shook ever-so-slightly in a way that George was getting far too used to hearing from the boy. It scared George more than a little to know that Harry was this vulnerable, but he pushed through regardless.
"He's a complicated person." George knew that it wasn't really his place to pass judgement on the professor, even if he knew that he was partly to blame for the abuse that Harry had suffered over the years. He was the person who forced Harry to go back to a family that hated him every single summer. This wasn't something that Harry often talked about either, in fact George didn't think that he'd ever heard Harry talk about what he continued to go through. That wasn't surprising to be honest when it had taken George practically the entire summer previous to get Harry to open up about what had happened in the Department of Mysteries in the first place.
"He…" Harry began but he trailed off, shaking his head and instead just opened his arms and beckoning George into them. George knew that meant the end of that particular conversation but considering that this was the anniversary of his parents death, George didn't dare push it.
Instead he allowed Harry to pull him close. They weren't together, at least not officially. They hadn't had the discussion about labels, and George kind of wanted to keep it that way after everything that had happened the previous year with their fake relationship and Harry's (failed) attempts to make Fred jealous.
They shuffled slightly so that they could both get comfortable. The chair wasn't really made for two people, but somehow they made it work and they managed to curl up on the chair together. A small voice at the back of George's mind told him that he should have moved the pair of them to his bed, but that sounded like effort and so instead Harry ended up falling asleep with his arms wrapped around George and his head on his shoulder.
George couldn't help but smile softly to himself. He'd worry about getting Harry back to Hogwarts where he belonged tomorrow. He'd continue to worry about what Harry meant about Dumbledore not being a good man, but for now he would push that out of his mind. He had to so that they could both just rest.