A/N: This drabble was written with the prompt 'graduate' and the character George. Also written for the Twenty Minute Drabble Challenge, the Minor Character Boot Camp with 'mischief' and the Character Trait! Boot Camp with paranoid!George.

Summary: When Fred and George are getting ready to set off the fireworks to mark their departure from Hogwarts and annoy Umbridge into the bargain, George starts getting some very unhelpful feelings about the matter.

)O(

"Ready to go, George?" Fred grins as stands up, eager to get on with the mischief.

"Yeah. Just give me a minute." George glances over the pile of readied fireworks, as if to make sure they are all still there. The twins' grand plan for wreaking havoc at Hogwarts had been planned to the smallest detail, but George still has a niggling feeling at the back of his mind that something isn't right.

He stares a bit more at the fireworks, then looks back at his brother.

"I guess we'll never graduate, eh?" he asks.

"Where did that one come from?" Fred turns around sharply, looking at his brother in disbelief. "I thought we'd agreed that trivial things like a diploma didn't matter in the grand scheme of things."

"I just wonder what it would be like if we did. If our lives would be any different..." George's voice lacks conviction, his eyes failing to meet his brother's.

"You can bet on it that our lives would be different; they'd be bloody boring! Can you imagine us, the famed jokers of Hogwarts, cooped up in some dingy old office? We'd die of boredom before our first week was up."

"But what if the joke shop doesn't work out? People are more worried than ever about You-Know-Who and it might be...tacky."

"Who are you and what have you done with my brother?" Fred grabs George by the shoulders and shakes him with a look of mock horror on his face. "Snap out of this before I'm forced to do something drastic. I don't think George's body would take kindly to having a firework blow up in his face."

George, surprised by this sudden show of force, looks flabbergasted before he breaks into a wide, ear-to-ear kind of grin.

"Thanks for reminding me of the strength of our arsenal; I think you've managed to scare away the intruder. Now that that paranoid bugger has gone, I think I'm ready to break some stuff. Hurry up with the fireworks, we haven't got all day!" He whips out his wand and point it at the box of joke shop products. "Open the door, or else all hell will break loose in here. We wouldn't want to waste a precious opportunity to annoy Umbridge, now, would we?"

Fred obliges, and soon the castle is full of whirling wheels and loud with the sound of firecrackers.

When the twins are speeding off on their brooms, George gets back the feeling he had hours before, except now, it's clearer. He can feel a door closing, a whole part of his life ending, never to be returned to. But sometimes a door must close before a world can be opened.

That doesn't change the fact that it unsettles him.

)O(

Fin

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