Chapter Text
He lasts four hours on his first day back at the Burrow before he breaks.
He had to go back home with his family - the alternative was a flat meant to be lived in by them, and there is no them anymore. The Burrow is for the Weasleys, and he is still, at the very least, a Weasley. Maybe. Half of a Weasley. A Wheeze. Not the fun kind they'd included in the name of their business, though. More of a wretched, choking, unable to breathe kind of wheeze.
It's not the tracking clock in the living room that now has eight hands settled at HOME instead of nine that gets him. Nor is it any of the family pictures hanging on the walls, of which he averts his gaze from and skirts past before he can catch any of the voices from them. If there's any perks to losing an ear, it's the muffled hearing loss that he has to strain to overcome, but can easily tune out if he isn't interested in listening to what someone has to say.
He even makes it all the way up to their room, closes the door, sits on the bottom bunk of their bed, and glances wearily around the room without so much as shedding a tear. Takes in all the evidence that he had once been a they, that two people had once and had always inhabited this space. There had never been less than two. Shouldn't ever be. And even like this, he can simply pretend that Fred's just downstairs grabbing something from the pantry to bring back up. The temperamental old clock just broke again. The quietness in the house is just because everyone else is outside, and he is taking a moment of solitude.
All is fine until he goes to the toilet, and across the sink, a haggard man with a pallid complexion, eyes devoid of life and dry, downturned lips looks back at him.
Is he alright? Is his first thought. And then the eyes in front of him widen in fear, and the flat expression morphs into one of horror and despair, and-
And then he is wheezing for breath with gritted teeth and a bloodied fist pulled back into his chest. The image of the man in front of him is splintered beyond recognition. Everything from his head to his toes burns with various degrees of pain, and, for the first time in his life, George Weasley despises that he had ever been a twin.
He'd disliked it a handful of times growing up. It was hard enough with three older brothers already vying for their parents' attention before they even came along, and even in the earliest memories George can recall, his mum and dad already had their hands full with Ron and Ginny. He and Fred were always just expected to entertain and look after each other. When he went into the kitchen alone, he'd never be greeted by name, just asked what he wanted and where his brother was. Which one? He'd asked once. Mum had blinked and hesitated, George, of course. I'm George, he'd replied, and the regretful look on her face made it so that he'd never ask again.
They went everywhere together after that. George is sure it hurt Fred just as much as it hurt him, that nobody in the house even knew their names, let alone paid much mind to them. They couldn't guess George's name wrong if he became Fred and George instead of just George, and the same went for Fred.
Or so they'd thought. If they pissed Mum off enough they'd occasionally get called Gideon and Fabian instead. Sometimes it felt like she wasn't even trying to learn the difference between them, that none of them were.
And there was a difference. Many of them. Fred was louder, and quicker to get angry, and always got up way too early in the morning. George had really hated sharing a room with him sometimes, found it so unfair that they had to share whilst the rest of their siblings and even the damn ghoul all got to have their own rooms. Charlie moving into Bill's room once Ginny was old enough to have her own didn't count, because they'd both wanted to share during the holidays once Bill started at Hogwarts. When they moved into the upstairs flat of the shop, George had made it clear that he was having his own room from then on, a semblance of privacy for once in his life.
Now, he'd give anything to be kept up at night by his twin's tossing and turning in the bunk above him, getting teddies thrown down into his face and being dragged out of bed by his ankles. He'd happily welcome back the wrestling and the explosions and the screaming. Anything but the so-called moments of peace and quiet he'd once wanted. It's suffocating, the silence of their bedroom, wrong in every way. This is all so damn wrong.
At some point, he comes back into his body, sitting outside in the grass with his legs curled up (or, more accurately, slumped over). Someone picks glass shards out of his bloodied hand with their own gloved arm, and half of his fingers already seem to be wrapped in a cloth. He stares at his hand as if it's something in the far distance he can't quite identify.
He won't be happy when he finds out I didn't get round to washing them after taking a piss before he started feeling them up.
George considers saying something about it out loud, but just as quickly decides that although Charlie - who he's identified as the one taking care of his hand - is the most likely to appreciate his jokes, he probably still won't laugh, considering the circumstances. George doesn't even know if he's capable of speaking at the moment, now aware of a lump in his throat that feels like it might soon become a choking hazard. Perhaps it's the bitterness inside him telling him that Charlie even being at the Burrow in front of him is an impossibility. He should be in Romania. He's only here because of the funeral.
He still doesn't know what he's supposed to do at the bloody funeral. Distantly, he remembers Fred and himself discussing how there'd be no dress codes at their funeral; just an expectation for fireworks and flashy robes. A true celebration of life. It doesn't seem such a good idea now. Not when an explosion was what took Fred away from them, and not when he was taken so soon, so unjustly. It's hardly a celebration of life when their lives had barely even started. They had so much more planned.
Honestly, George doesn't even want to show up. No one in his family can even look at him because it's too painful for them to see his ugly mug and not Fred's. He can't do anything but keep his head down if he doesn't want people to look at him and immediately start sobbing - the exact opposite of their preferred method of acknowledging the dead.
It had always been cheering people up. Had been since the last time the wizarding world was at war. He and Fred were only toddlers then, but he still remembers everyone around them being so miserable. George was used to playing around with Fred and making him smile and laugh and scream and cry. If everyone else was sad and quiet, so was Fred. They both were.
It took effort to get each other to smile in those times, and joint teamwork to get those around them to do the same. Sometimes people screamed and cried and yelled at them instead - well, more usually rather than sometimes - but at least they were doing something other than looking blankly at one another, like they themselves were the ones devoid of life. George much preferred animated, lively expressions over serious faces that tried to hold back bottled-up emotions. So did Fred.
He recalls, suddenly, why he punched the mirror. The horror he felt when he saw that disgusting expression he's always hated seeing on other people's faces. It had so quickly bubbled up into anger that he could dare to defile Fred's face that way, to have distorted his appearance beyond recognition for even a single moment. George is painfully aware that he - his physical appearance, his body - is the last living memory of Fred there is, and instead, he looks less like an alive Fred and more like his corpse. No wonder nobody else can stand to look at him.
This is not what he's supposed to be doing. He is supposed to smile and make jokes, cheer everyone up. The war is over, and no one is going to be ripped away from them so violently anymore. They had entered the Battle of Hogwarts fully aware of the freedoms they were fighting for others to be able to have, even if it cost them their lives. They were prepared to die.
Maybe that's George's issue. In retrospect, he had only really considered two outcomes when entering the battle; that they would live, or that they would die. He was not at all prepared for a scenario in which only one of them would make it, and the other would not. That they could be separated by life and death was not even on the list of possibilities he had conjured up in his head. He had always believed in full confidence that they would both live and die together. He wasn't worried at all as long as his twin stayed or went with him. How could he have thought otherwise, when they had never strayed far enough from one another to consider a life in which they were separated?
Perhaps Fred did, he realises. He did think that Fred seemed more uneasy about the battle than himself, but never thought much of it - Fred was always the more high-strung of the two, whilst George would consider himself more laid-back. Though George was usually more of a thinker, maybe the heavy implications of what could happen hadn't really sunk in the same way it did for Fred, who ran higher on emotions. Though, he'd been different since-
Since last summer, when George had gotten his ear blasted off by death eaters. His memories of those first few days after transferring Harry to the Burrow are a little groggy, but he clearly remembers Fred's sullen, blank face - the one that pisses him off so much, reminds him of the first war - as he mothered over George. They had just stared at each other whilst he laid on the sofa, blood slowly seeping through his bandages as a different healer came every few hours to try and work out how the hell to close the wound.
In his heart, George knows what Fred was feeling, but his twin never said anything, and instead just opted to look at him all pathetic like that. They were really too old to be saying things like I'm sad and scared because you got hurt and I didn't think you were gonna be alright by that point, and experienced enough in each other's company to be able to communicate the sentiment of it with a single look. He'd had to goad Fred into leaving the room to give himself at least five minutes of peace with the jab that George would be watching him piss his pants eventually. Fred hadn't laughed, nor smiled, nor even seemed that indignant that he was being made fun of for hovering. It was as if a switch had been flipped inside his twin, one that had been faulty their entire lives; Fred had learned how to be serious.
For a little while after that, it had been George that needed to step up first and crack a joke to a room of defeated faces. It wasn't particularly difficult - he'd had a lifetime of experience pretending to be his twin and covering for him countless times - but it didn't come naturally to him. And while no one else around them might have noticed, he and Fred were fully aware of odd it was. It wasn't the natural order of their dynamic. But George knows Fred wouldn't have wanted people to catch onto him being off, so it was his due diligence as his brother to try and keep people smiling until his twin felt up to leading again. Fred's preferred method of being comforted, because he was dogshit at actual verbal communication and heart-to-hearts, was acts of service, whilst George himself definitely favoured talking things out and physical comfort.
It's hard to remember the last time Fred had really done such a thing with him, and George eventually recovers the very suppressed memory of the end of the Triwizard Tournament. He'd been distraught over Cedric's death - a boy they'd both known since all of them were very young, given they all lived within proximity of Ottery St Catchpole - and, for the first time in years, Fred had climbed into George's bed and held him all night as they wept into one another's shoulders. George was full of regret regarding Cedric - from the moment they'd been sorted into different houses from one another, they had grown distant from the older boy, and he'd give anything now to redo it all from the start and rekindle that friendship. Cedric was an incredible man, and he'd been an incredible boy, too. All George could think of the night that he died was all the times they'd played together as boys, replaying the memories of a tiny Cedric Diggory smiling and laughing even as he was teased and dragged into trouble by the twins over and over again, and how those days would never come back now that he was dead.
George tries to remember how long it took him to process Cedric's death, but thinking about how he'd died in the Triwizard Tournament makes him think about how he and Fred had tried to enter it. How it could have been one of them that died that night, if their plan had been successful. George had known deep in his heart even then that the potion he'd made perfectly down to the drop probably wouldn't work, but after the awful summer they'd had, it was the best chance to recover the money Bagman had nicked from them that they were going to get, so they had to go for it anyway, if they wanted any chance for the business to come to fruition. And that if it went wrong, it would at least be good for a laugh.
It's painful to know now that that moment of hopeful stupidity was the only time he'll ever get to see what Fred looked like if he was older. What's worse is that he doesn't even really have a clear image of it in his head - it just seems like a blur in the absolute catastrophe that was their sixth year. He's terrified, suddenly, that it might not take him long to not remember it at all, if he doesn't try to bottle it into a vial soon. Because there will be no growing old with Fred (fuck, he's the younger twin, but he's already older than Fred will ever be), no shared birthdays (how the hell is he supposed to celebrate their birthday alone), not one more memory left to make with him. Yet, somehow, George is supposed to carry on with the rest of his life without Fred to lead him.
He doesn't want to let go. He doesn't want to lose it all to time, not a single second. He clings to Charlie like he's a little boy once more, seeking comfort from his favourite big brother that isn't Fred. Charlie indulges him, pulling George half into his lap and wrapping his arms around him firmly.
"It's okay," he whispers, but his voice is hoarse. It's not, George wants to scream, and nearly does, but all that comes out is a sob instead. His fists clench the fabric of Charlie's shirt, even if his mind viscerally rejects the idea. He doesn't want Charlie. He wants Fred. He wants to go back in time and be a child forever, when everything wasn't horrible and nothing really mattered. When all his siblings were at the Burrow because they lived there, not because one of them was dead and they needed to stick together now more than ever.
Charlie can't make this better for him, not the way he could make everything better when they were kids and George ran to him for comfort. George doesn't even know how to begin to explain what he's feeling, and even if he could, there's no way Charlie could ever understand. He may be mourning his little brother, and it must be awful for him, George knows, but he still has his own things to do, somewhere that people expect him to go back to after all this. He's still Charlie. George isn't George anymore. He doesn't know how to be a fucking person, a singular entity. This wasn't part of the plan, and he doesn't know what to do with himself.
He doesn't know what in Merlin's name he's supposed to do with the business, either. There's no possible way he can do it alone, even if he bins off the Hogsmeade property and manages to get Verity back into his employment. But deep in his conscience, he knows it's just as impossible for him to throw it all away just because he can't handle it. Fred would never forgive him for letting his dream die along with him.
It's easy to tell himself the next logical steps, that he needs to carry on with the business, carry on making jokes, keep living in honour of Fred's memory. Keep in touch with Lee and Angelina and the rest of their mates. Live the life they were supposed to live, that Fred was looking forward to, for his sake. But it just seems so impossibly hard to do in practice. George might have been able to do it last year, ramp up the energy a bit in the absence of Fred's usual liveliness, but at least Fred was still there to play the role of George. The road that lies ahead of him is being Fred, the singular person, and then also being George. Or, even if he's not George, he still has to live as if he's Fred, and he just can't do that, not on a long-term basis without a partner in crime to indulge and aid him. They're too different.
He can't be Fred for anyone. But he can't really be George, either. He isn't who he was last week. Last week, even when he wasn't Fred and George, he was still and George.
He comes to the staggering realisation that he has never, not really, been George before. But he is now. And that won't change. He can't be anyone else, only George Weasley, and he doesn't even know who George Weasley is. Despite all the bitterness he'd held about everyone never being able to tell them apart and viewing them as one person instead of two separate people, somewhere along the way, Fred and George had fallen into their trap, and had learned to believe the same about themselves.
"Wh-Who..." He coughs, trying to clear his throat of mucus. He doesn't know how long he's been crying. Charlie stops rubbing circles into his back and pushes some distance between them, holding George by the sides of his arms to they can look at one another. "Who am I?" George asks him, his voice no higher than a whisper.
He watches Charlie's pupils contract and his jaw tremble.
"What..." Charlie starts, but can't finish his sentence, just looks at George with concern, his eyebrows furrowed.
"I-I don't... I dunno who..." I don't know who I am. George tries to tell him.
"You're," Charlie swallows, his eyes swimming with unshed tears. "You're George." Which twin am I? Charlie thinks he means.
"How do you know?" George presses, his throat raw. Who is this 'George' that you speak of? How can you be sure that I'm him? I don't even know who George is. I'm just wearing his skin.
Charlie's eyes flit towards his missing ear before closing, yet he doesn't answer him, just pulls him back into his embrace. George stares blankly over his brother's shoulder at the dilapidated wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, watching a single magpie chip away at the stones leisurely.
Two for mirth, one for sorrow.