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George’s hands shake as he traces slow patterns across the surface of the lake. His legs have long gone numb under him, the belt of his dress pants digs into the bruise still splayed across his upper thigh and a good chunk of the side of his torso. The rest of him is riddled with dark spots too, a few slowly healing scabs marking where debris sliced through his skin.
His mother’s cries are muffled, low and aching, a type of grief George can’t bring himself to give into. From his position at the lake’s edge he can’t see his family, but he can hear them. The memorial service for the dead of the Battle of Hogwarts will be long and their grief already threatens to drown him.
Harry and Hermione’s voices are low from where they stand huddled together with Ron. The side of Harry’s leg brushes against George’s shoulder every so often. Everytime it happens George’s breath catches from the shock of the contact. He hasn’t gotten much in the weeks since Fred died aside from the occasional too-tight, too-heavy hug from one of his siblings.
He blinks, once, twice, focuses on the rattling breaths his father is taking. Bill and Charlie are gently coaxing Molly down. Percy is on George’s free side, glaring down at the ground, fingers tangled in Ginny’s hair on his leg.
The water is gentle where it laps at his fingertips. It soothes the quickly familiar pain under his skin for just a breath. He wonders if the constant ache is from Fred disappearing under rubble and rock, the bruises that bloomed after his last breath.
Bill’s voice snaps out suddenly, “George isn’t dead, Mum!” The resulting silence is oppressive. There’s a swirl of movement before Hermione’s skirt brushes across his back. Percy’s hand settles on his shoulder firmly as Ginny sits up, every muscle tense.
Molly stutters, waterlogged, “That wasn’t-“
Bill stands roughly, cutting off whatever their mother was about to say.
George can’t help it. He tips over, head over knees, shaking hands pressed to his lips as he desperately tries to muffle his laughter. He laughs. It’s the good sort where your belly aches and your chest heaves and for just a moment it’s the worst thing you’ve ever felt.
Merlin, his mum might just be right.
“Maybe I am dead,” he murmurs, mostly to himself but Percy stills startles next to him and Charlie makes a cut off sound that echoes a protest.
At any rate, he’s half-dead, his other half about to be buried out in the field of graves that Hogwarts now protects. Even fucking Sirius Black with no body to be collected got a headstone out there. The Potters too. The Longbottoms. The Creevey kids. Tonks and Lupin. Diggory. On and on, like a never ending reel of crushing grief and dead kids and dead parents and dead people.
Fred’s gravestone will be out there surrounded by people they barely knew or never met and it will say Fred Weasley not FredandGeorge Weasley. It will not say: Here lies half of The Weasley Twins, or, Half of a Soul. It will say: Fred Weasley, loving brother, son, and friend, always to be remembered.
Percy’s arm curls across George’s back. Ginny’s hair falls into a blurry view as she crouches at his head and George can practically feel Bill hovering. It aches, it all aches. And, suddenly, he realizes he stopped laughing at some point.
George isn’t crying, but he’s heaving for air. Fine tremors shake him apart at the seams and there are too many hands trying to hold already broken pieces together.
He stumbles to his feet, batting hesitant hands away and shoving past Ginny and just tips forward. He stumbles over his own feet, dirty boots tangling in the muddy bank. His knees hit the water first and then he’s falling. The lake welcomes him.
Cold water rushes past the smarting bruises and scabs and the knot of cartilage where his ear used to be. It drowns out the startled shouts and now confident hands that he kicks away and he’s being dragged forward by some unseen force.
“George!”
The heat of the day is swallowed away by the lake. For a terrible, wretched moment nothing is wrong and he can imagine it’s 6th year and he’s in the lake on a dare, Fred only a half-step in front of him. He opens his eyes against the crush of water and finds a great, murky nothingness. His twin is dead, cold body waiting back in the castle they grew up in.
The water is cool and soothing. There is a melancholy peace here, his family’s shouts a muffled cacophony above his head. His good ear can’t hear nearly well enough to understand the flurry of shouts. George closes his eyes, finding his feet under him.
His dress shoes sink into the muddy lakebed. They’re old, pinch his toes, and probably belonged to all three of their older brothers before them. The carefully cared for azure dragon-hide loafers that he and Fred bought off their fourth month’s revenue weren’t funeral-fit for his mother. He could have transfigured one of their pairs of shoes to black, but his hands had shook and he couldn’t make himself disturb them where they sat next to each other on the shoe rack.
He stands.
Water cascades down his body, his dress robes squelch as he tugs them off hurriedly. The itchy wool floats across the surface of the lake and is quickly snatched up by a furious Molly Weasley.
In some distant corner of his mind George had maybe hoped that the water would shock him back to normal, but now he’s just wet and miserable and so achingly sad. The agonizing gap in his soul, his magic, hell, his body is still there.
His mother twists her wrist, cheeks red and splotchy. His robes take on the unnatural stiffness of a badly-cast drying spell, an unfortunate side-effect of Molly’s wandless magic was that she was never quite willing to admit that she wasn’t good at any of the menial spells and therefore just cast them badly.
George and Fred used to be at the top of their class in wandless magic. They could cast practically anything with a roll of their wrist and a tug at the unbreakable rope that always connected them. Now, George can barely cast a lumos with his wand in hand. He would try Fred’s, but it’s snapped clean in half by the same explosion that killed it’s wizard.
Her jaw is trembling. George doesn’t think he’s seen his mum quite so angry since they nearly burnt the house down in fifth year. She hooks a finger in the collar of his shirt and drags him out the lake, water sloshing up their thighs.
Her chin is still dripping tears and her eyes are puffy from her crying. And George, George is thinking, ‘What gives her the right? Why does she get to grieve for someone she only half-knew?’ George is trembling with rage, that fuse that Fred used to tease was too long by half finally spent.
George looks around, approaching desperation, anger and cold and the heat of his agony coloring his pale cheeks cherry red. His siblings are watching wide-eyed, some of them with wet shoes and wet hems and Hermione is simply staring, staring like she knows something and Harry has his eyes on Molly’s hands. Arthur is wet to his chest and his hands are shaking as they come to clutch at George’s.
He has the sudden startling thought that this is the first time his parents have touched him since the night Fred died.
Molly opens her mouth, short-fused fury and long-winded fear in one. George beats her to it.
“Mum,” he pleads, still half-expecting Fred’s voice to pick up the sentence. He pulls away from the grasping touches and scowls when they glance away guiltily.
He is just so tired of their inability to see the dead half of him and not look away. Paradoxically, he wants to disappear, wants to steal Harry’s invisibility cloak and live his life as a whisper in the corner of the room, as the jagged piece of soul that he’s become.
George grasps at his own shirt, his hands cold and his chest warm. He speaks softly to his parents’ gazes that settle at the remnants of his ear. “Mum, please. I’m right here. I’m still here.”
Molly trips forward, trembling hands framing his cheeks between her still-wet palms, George’s robes are tossed over her shoulder, spilling across her chest and stomach in a stream of dark fabric. The feel of her hand on his right side is odd after near two decades of each of her hands for each of her twins.
She studies him, silent, tears glistening in her eyes. He shakes under her inspection, waiting for her to find the jagged edges that are all that make him up now and turn away again. He waits and he counts his breaths and he thinks of Fred.
She purses her lips and then pulls away, reaching into the pocket of her robes. Behind her, Arthur reaches into his own. Each of them brings forth half of Fred’s wand, the raw ends spilling the magic-memory of his voice and his laugh and his fear in those last aching years.
“I-“ Molly starts, staring at the piece she holds, the dark wood of its handle, well-loved and worn. “I should have given this to you weeks ago, George.”
Arthur presses forward, the pointing end of Fred’s wand in his hands. “I’m so sorry.” Arthur lifts his gaze, and something crumbles in his expression when there’s only one twin in front of him. He hands his half of the wand to George, wrapping his fingers around it when George doesn’t open his hand. He holds him there for a moment, his hands over George’s where it curls over the wand.
Grief-sick magic tingles up George’s spine, the wand seeking the familiarity of it’s bearer’s twin. His mouth tastes like copper as their father pulls away in response to his silence.
“Georgie,” Molly hums, taking his occupied hand in her own and offering the other end of the wand to him. Fred’s wand sings, tickling at his palm and calling, calling, begging to go home, to return to itself and to Fred.
George swallows and wraps his fingers around the jagged thing, drawing it close to his chest with the other piece. He shudders when something inside clicks and his own wand is burning a hole in his pocket, smuggled away from his family’s too-worried faces.
“Mum,” Bill hesitates, rocking back in his heels, “George, we need to go.” He cuts a glance to Arthur, a plea clear on his face. Arthur sighs, already shepherding Molly away. She resists for just a moment, her magic drying George abruptly before she’s pushed away.
Someone hooks their fingers around George’s elbow. He follows like a puppet on a string. The edges of his vision greys out when they push him down into a hard-backed chair.
Bill crouches in front of him, Percy hovering over his shoulder. Somehow, George has lost track of the rest of their gaggle. There is a steady murmur of noise from the slowly building crush of mourners.
“Just remember to breathe,” Bill whispers, jagged red scars pulling and crinkling oddly across his lips. His fingers tangle into the stiff fabric of his dress shirt. George’s robes are set in his lap by phantom hands, dark, calloused knuckles giving away Harry.
Someone must have cast drying spells on the lot of them, there’s no trace of George’s jaunt into the lake as they take their seats around him. Bill and Percy are hesitating, identical frowns on their faces.
“Breathe,” Percy finally says, pushing back his fringe with a worried hand and shambles down the aisle to take one of the last free seats in it. Bill takes a moment longer, searching for something in George’s expression before giving up.
A wand crackles, mahogany wood and a slender form paired with a tall stately reverend when George turns to find the caster. The silent spell starts up a low funeral dirge, something Fred would have loathed.
George raises his hands from his lap, wand pieces spitting magic at him. Red sparks up his wrist with a tang of grief-hurt-longing-love. The reverend is speaking in a low drone and dull magic rises up around them, swirling around the shiny black coffin laid out before them.
George wishes death looked like sleep. But, Fred’s skin is pale and waxy and his chest is unnaturally still.
Ginny urges him to his feet when the last of the mourning magic fades. His robes tumble to the grass in a sluice of rippling black and she hurriedly kicks them under his chair. She guides him to the coffin, hand tight on his elbow.
It’s like a thread under his sternum. It drags him forward as soon as he’s within a few meters of Fred’s coffin. Pure silk cushions the corpse within. Someone has tucked a rose between his hands and galleons glint on his breast, carefully placed over his heart.
George trembles, shakes, he keens low in the back of his throat and bends at the waist. His clenched fists meet the edge of the coffin and he tips forward until he’s half in it. He considers climbing in with his twin but knows Ginny is seconds from hauling him away.
“Freddie,” he gasps and the pieces of his brother’s wand hiss in his palms. He tucks them away with shaking hands that tangle and twist in the fabric of his pants. His fingertips meet the smooth wood of his own wand, the thing silent and magicless.
He pulls it free, still shaking, still gasping in agony and bent at the waist. He twines it between Fred’s fingers, the cold body stiff and unforgiving, refusing to bend.
The wand sings.