Chapter Text
The crack of stone. Screams of pain. A blinding flash. Harry instinctively jumps up, raising her wand, ready to defend, and finds herself surrounded by the trembling walls of Hogwarts. They were about to descend on her. She rolls, jumps, and her legs carry her away from here. At this time, an alarming thought is beating in her head that she urgently needs to find something. Or someone else. The mark of the other half emits an attractive pulsation, as if encouraging her to move forward faster, otherwise she will be too late. From somewhere on the right comes: "Bombarda!" And the next moment, the wall next to Harry shatters into pieces. She doesn't stop to look at the attacker. There is no time. And even though she doesn't know where she's going, anxiety is building in her chest. Stuck in her head was the doomed realization that she was late. Harry doesn't remember how long she ran, how many debris she managed to dodge, or what was going on, but she knows she needs to hurry. Suddenly, Fred's bright red hair appears around a bend, and the girl accelerates, despite catching her breath from a long run.
"Fred!" Harry screams in fright, noticing a dark figure behind the guy, raising his wand.
He, not realizing what is happening, turns abruptly to her. The guy anxiously examines the surroundings of the frightened girl, ready to protect her from any danger. In the next second, Rookwood utters a cursed phrase behind Fred's back, like a death sentence, and a wall collapses on Fred. She was too late. She didn't save him. She had to follow the mark and protect him. She screwed up.
As if turned on, Harry furiously shovels the stones aside, not fully understanding what for. And now Fred's face appears from under the rubble. His eyes are still open, reflecting the blue sky. The expression on his face is a little surprised and a little childish, the way Harry remembered it when he was alive. The mark burns and seems to pull her forward, following Fred to the other side. Death loves Harry, and therefore visits her so often, taking her loved ones. Her lips tremble, her breath catches, and tears come to her eyes, but she can't take her eyes off Fred's dead body, as if trying to hold him in her life a little longer.
"Why?" just one exhaled question.
Harry looks up and sees the devastated expression on George's face as he collapses to his knees. He reaches out with a trembling hand to Fred's pale face, as if seeking confirmation of the reality of what is happening. And when he finally feels the cold under his fingers, he begins to roar in sorrow, which turns into incoherent sobs.
Harry hears in this question "Why didn't you save him?", although she knows that these are thousands of why questions that George asks every time before going to bed. Why did he die? Why does it have to be him? Why didn't George die? Why wasn't he there when Fred was dying alone? Why? He thinks about it so often that Harry is afraid to find out how often he does it while she is not seeing him. And even though he's asking all these questions, she knows he's not asking the most important thing: "Why didn't you save him?" And it breaks her heart.
Shards crunch under George's shoe as he gets up and silently walks into the dilapidated doorway. His back is slowly shrinking, almost disappearing into the mist that had appeared while they were mourning Fred. In a new fit of anxiety, Harry, slipping and falling, runs after him, afraid to lose sight of him.
Here he is. He stands next to the shop window, seemingly lost in distant memories. He's melting. George melts in front of her eyes, and Harry wants to burst into tears. He was very thin and haggard, and his eyes were very tired. He's getting smaller and smaller every day, and it's scary. She had long ago accepted that there was almost nothing left of him, he was buried there, in the same grave with Fred. But she's not ready to lose George either. She dreads the day when he will dissolve, become transparent and disappear forever. And she would be alone again. And even though she is constantly by his side, helping with the store, it doesn't seem enough. Harry blinks and George is gone. The mark is uncomfortably cold on the skin, black, lifeless. It is a boundless black hole that slowly and inexorably sucks in everything around it, destroying any reminder of the twins' existence. And Harry can only scream silently, watching uselessly as she falls into the boundless void. Something jerked sharply and broke off.
Harry sat up abruptly, startled. The boundless darkness began to haunt after death, taking over the entire space of nightmares under itself. After she woke up in absolute darkness for the first time, she had a tantrum, so George carefully installed a night light in the room. Warm yellow birds slowly float across the ceiling, reminding us that there is something warm and bright left in the world. George, who was tossing restlessly in his sleep, seemed to sense something and opened his eyes, half-asleep, looking around. Not intending to take away from the guy those few minutes of rest that he could allow with a mind restless from grief, Harry exhaled, recovering from a gloomy nightmare, and lay back, snuggling tightly against George.
Yes, he lost a lot of weight. Yes, it was as if he was melting away without his brother, having lost touch. Yes, it broke them. At least they still had each other and were painfully afraid to leave the other even for a minute. Maybe it was on the verge of madness, but after Fred's death, it became scary to find out how much time they had left. Especially when they spent so many evenings together in the living room, talking about the future, so that they would not be able to fulfill any of this.
Listening to George's slow breathing, Harry closed her eyes, reliving the events of the nightmare over and over again. Not the worst of them. Sometimes Fred didn't die that fast. He could have screamed for help for hours, and Harry would have been useless trying to break through an invisible wall that would not let her in. Sometimes he would say all the things she was thinking about herself. For some reason, George never accused her in a dream, did not say those things that he would not have said in real life. It was as if his soul, bound through a mark, penetrated her dreams, preventing Harry from torturing herself. But dead Fred was in complete control of her subconscious, bringing to the surface all those thoughts that she had been pushing away during the day for George's sake. Perhaps he was just never afraid to say something directly, offend someone, and now he just continued to do it, reminding Harry of what she really deserves. Sometimes he wasn't alone. Sometimes there was also George standing in that place. He tried to save Fred by grabbing and jumping to the side, he was just protecting his brother from Rookwood's deadly spell, he himself was dying or lying with his ear torn off while the destroyed wall fell on the twins. They had died together, and as Harry knew from George's quiet, guilty whispers when he confessed on particularly bad days, it might have been better for them. And she selfishly couldn't be happy for them because she was so afraid of being alone.
They were both so broken. And of the ways to survive, they have nothing left but unhealthy and abnormal habits that have helped them to stick until now.