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Some time when Fred and George were two or three years old, they got it into their heads that no one should know which of them was Fred and which was George. The war was reaching its height then, and the twins were too young to understand it, but the fear hung heavily in the air, and they understood that well enough. At two or three years old, they didn’t know much about life, or what was going on outside the Burrow, but they had already decided that making people smile was the most important thing in all the world, and that fighting bad guys was the second most.
Neither of them can remember how they got the idea, of course. They might have heard somewhere that names had power, which is perfectly true, and came to the conclusion, the way small children do, that if no one knew their names for certain, then Voldomort could never hurt them.
It was the sort of silly idea that children always have, that almost always come to nothing, but Fred and George were more tenacious than most, and even as young as they were they planned well. It gave them a sense of agency, this plan of theirs. In a world full of fear, where the darkness seems to be closing in, inescapable, it is a terrible thing to be young and helpless. It is a terrible thing to be so small, to know in that instinctive way that children know, that you are a burden, that your parents are terrified for your sake, and that there is nothing you can do to help.
At no point in their lives have either Fred or George been the sort of people content to do nothing.
At first all they did was contradict anyone who got their name right, to which their mother rolled her eyes, and insisted on their proper names. Then, they started contradicting everyone regardless of whether they got it wrong or not. Later, though, they got cleverer about it.
“ I’ll be George till bedtime,” Fred said, in excitedly conspiratorial tones “And then you be George.” And George nodded and grinned. They started to be consistent, and didn’t contradict each other. They did things thoroughly, switching in the middle of dinner, or as soon as their mother turned her back, changing into each other’s clothes in the middle of the day, they switched beds in the middle of the night. George gave Fred his beloved teddy bear to sleep with, and Fred let George wear his favorite shirt for the first time ever.
“George,” their mother said sternly, as she had many times before, “You know that’s Fred’s shirt, and he doesn’t like you to wear it.”
“No! I’m Fred and this is my shirt, and George can’t have it!” George proclaimed, rather unconvincingly except that Fred just nodded along, instead of throwing a tantrum about it.
(Molly had a bit of a breakdown, at some point near the end of the war. What kind of mother was she, when she couldn’t tell her own children apart?)
Voldomort was defeated, and the wizarding world was safe, but that didn’t immediately make the kids feel safe, and switching names back and forth was still a fun sort of game. Also, the twins had been doing this for nearly a year, and they couldn’t be sure anymore which of them belonged to which name anyway.
When the twins were eleven the Sorting Hat called “Weasley, Frederick!” and they had looked at each other and shrugged, and one of them walked up and sat under the hat.
“You’re not Fred, you’re George!” the hat had objected, and George, apparently, had laughed with everyone else, because it was a good joke, but they’d honestly had no idea.