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mini_festTitle: Christmas Changes Too
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kingzgurl
Character(s): George Weasley, Fred Weasley
Prompt:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
mini_fest 2012 - Christmas without Fred
Word Count: 3,085
Rating: PG
Contains (Highlight to view): *Character Death, canon*
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Christmas was always memorable at the Burrow, but then a year came when it all changed.
***
The first Christmas that George really remembered was one of the more memorable Weasley family Christmases. He remembered he was young, but he must have been five or so because Ginny was definitely there, even if she was only a baby.
That was the year their mum had mixed up the presents for him and Fred, and he had gotten Fred’s mittens and jumper, and Fred had gotten his. They had both giggled and put them on anyway because there were few things better than confusing their parents and siblings by calling each other the wrong names throughout the day.
They had also gotten the best present that year – a broomstick! It was smaller than Charlie and Bill’s brooms, and it didn’t go nearly as high, but they could get a few feet off the ground with the both of them on it, and to them that meant it was the best thing ever! They had immediately tried to use it indoors and their mum had shouted at them a bit until she told them to take it outside for a go. Of course they had to bundle up first because there was cold and snow, but because she was mum she didn’t understand that they needed to try it out right then.
She’d even let them stay out in the garden until dinner: flying in circles and tumbling off into huge drifts of snow, going as fast as they could (which in reality wasn’t very fast but to a five year old it felt like a thousand kilometers a minute) and seeing which one could hold on longer, and trying their best to coax the little broom over the garden wall to explore beyond (sadly they never quite made it). Even with the smell and lure of dinner, it was a hard fought argument to stay out and play with their pink cheeks and numb noses.
After supper, when they were too full on Christmas pudding to think about going out again, the twins played with their new exploding snap cards. The last set had exploded rather violently a few weeks before Christmas and was unusable – the twins still swore they didn’t do anything to tamper with the exploding charm, but they may have spent an entire Tuesday poking and prodding at them with toy wands while they tried to figure out how to make them explode on command.
Everyone was distracted with their own toys and presents that no one really paid any attention to Ron crawling out of the room, even their mum was napping on the sofa and didn’t notice. Until there was a loud crash in the hall and Ron’s wailing cry. For whatever reason everyone looked at the twins first – as if things are always their fault! – before they all rushed to the hallway to see Ron on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with broken bits of wood and bristles around and under him. Their broomstick!
“RON!” Fred and George shouted in unison with their mum, who rushed towards the toddler while the twins just looked on heartbroken at the fate of their favorite toy. It was like she cared more about Ron, who was fine and didn’t look hurt at all, than she did about their shattered broomstick!
“Mum! He broke our broom!” tears burned George’s eyes, but he wasn’t going to cry, he wasn’t!
“Shush, Fred,” their mum called over her shoulder as she hugged Ron and took him back to the sitting room to give him the new stuffed teddy bear he had gotten that morning.
“But dad!” Fred argued, appealing to their other parent who didn’t seem quite as concerned over Ron’s crash.
Their dad sighed, “George, let’s just find out if your brother is okay and then we’ll look at the broom.”
George could feel just how angry Fred was next to him and that put a stop to his tears that threatened to fall. Fred was always the one who got angry when Ron stole their toys, far more so than the annoyed that George usually was about the same incident, but he’d never seen his twin quite this angry. He was glad that his brother could be angry enough for the both of them.
“No! It’s not fair!” Fred stomped back into the room with George on his heels. “He’s always taking our things and breaking them!”
“Stop shouting,” their mum shushed them again, and that was when Fred snapped.
George felt the explosion of magic, and it surprised him as much as it surprised Fred and everyone else in the room. For a second it was like nothing happened, and then Ron’s new teddy bear turned into a teddy bear-sized spider: black and hairy with eight creepy legs and big pincher teeth, and it crawled and wriggled in Ron’s arms until he screamed bloody murder and threw it across the room in a panic.
Everyone else was stunned, shocked at what Fred had done, until their dad had flicked his wand at it and turned it back into the teddy bear it was before it had been transfigured.
“C’mon,” George whispered and tugged at Fred’s sleeve, “mum’s gonna shout.”
Ron screamed louder still, refusing to even look at the stuffed bear, and caused such a ruckus that it got everyone’s attention back on him and gave the twins the chance to escape. They stopped in the hall only long enough to pick up the largest pieces of their broomstick before they ran up to their room and hid for the rest of the night.
Six rolls of spellotape and two days later, they declared the broom a lost cause and had permanently blown up their new deck of exploding snap cards (successfully singing off Ron’s eyebrows in the process).
***
The best Christmas gift ever, George thought, was when he and Fred were nine and unintentionally (or purposely, depending who you asked) gave the entire Weasley family a great gift with the help of Charlie and Bill (who would never admit to taking part).
There was a rule in the Burrow, made by their mum when the twins were seven, which said they were not allowed to have dungbombs in the house. Naturally, they had quite the stash hidden away and refreshed often with packages from Bill and Charlie after Hogsmeade weekends and visits to Zonko’s. On Christmas morning the best gifts were not the ones under the tree (though they did love their jumpers and the more ‘acceptable’ Zonko’s gifts), but the one in the plain brown box on the desk in their room when they woke up – dungbombs and stink pellets! Enough to last them until the Easter holidays when their oldest brothers would be home again with another box full of birthday presents!
Since the no-dungbomb rule was enforced, the twins had been careful not to get caught with them. Rather than just drop and run, like they had done when they were younger and less wise, dungbomb and stink pellet placement became strategy. Beneath Ron’s bed was always an acceptable location for a dungbomb. Under his pillow while he slept was even better for the stink pellets.
After presents were opened on Christmas morning and everyone settled in with their new toys (Percy got a book - a book!), Fred and George were huddled in the corner nearest the fire with a healthy stash of sugar quills and licorice wands to last them through their scheming. With Percy home for the holidays they had only a limited time to hide stink pellets among his things, and it required careful thought as George sucked on a sugar quill.
The surprisingly quiet morning in the Burrow was interrupted by the arrival of their Great Aunt Muriel, and the twins could only groan quietly and hide as long as possible before they had to great her.
“There you two are – I was starting to think that Molly had come to her senses and had the pair of you shipped off to a school for naughty boys!”
George stood next to his brother and did his best to smile as he hugged her awkwardly in greeting. “Happy Christmas.” Aunt Muriel always smelled like boiled cabbage that had been overboiled and left on a bit too long, and George knew that when he escaped her grasp the smell would have transferred to him and his new jumper (which actually had his own name on it!) and would make him uncomfortable for the rest of the night. No one wanted to smell like boiled cabbage!
“Shoo now,” she told them a minute later after she had released both of them. “The adults have things to talk about.”
They couldn’t get away soon enough and scurried back to their corner to scheme.
George couldn’t hear what Muriel was talking about with their mum in the kitchen, but he didn’t care much either, until they were called for dinner an hour later. A plan was firmly in effect, but it would begin with a quick trip upstairs to their room.
“We’re going to go wash up, mum. Be right back!” George called over his shoulder as they took the stairs two at a time in their haste to fetch what they needed from their Christmas stash.
With all the commotion getting settled in at the table, it didn’t seem that anyone had noticed their late entrance, which was for the best as they took their seats across from Aunt Muriel. Ron had the unfortunate luck of being seated next to her this year, which he rightfully deserved in George’s mind. Just before Halloween he’d stolen some of the twins’ best Chocolate Frog cards and took them to show off to the boy down the lane, then lost them somewhere along the way. Fred had been catching spiders and hiding them in Ron’s room ever since.
Dinner started out fairly uneventfully, until Aunt Muriel started in with being mean to everyone at the table. “Bill really ought to have a haircut. I almost confused him for a daughter of yours.”
“Arthur, you should ask the ministry for a raise. I have no idea how you will afford to send the rest of your offspring away to school in a few years time.”
“Molly, don’t forget that your youngest is a girl and should be dressing more like a lady than another boy.”
The longer it went on, the more Fred grew twitchy at his side. George could tell that his twin was dying to say something to shut her up, but it was too soon. The plan called for them to wait a bit longer.
“Do we have to wait?” Fred murmured around a mouthful of mashed parsnip.
“It’s almost time,” George reminded him as he leaned over to steal the last of the turkey from his brother’s plate. It was part of the plan, after all, but no one batted an eye at the common action of one twin taking food from the other’s plate. No one, that was, except Aunt Muriel.
“Honestly! Can’t you boys be civilized for a meal and eat from your own plate?” George didn’t understand why it upset her so much.
“I’ll clear plates,” Fred announced suddenly, step two of the plan, and stood quickly to snatch his plate off the table and unbalance George who had still been tipped to the side. Among his flailing not to fall (a particularly good acting job, in George’s opinion), he knocked the plate out of Fred’s careless grip. Step three was in effect as the plate fell, landing perfectly on Fred’s foot so as not to break but with enough force to scatter his fork and knife. “Oops!”
George grinned sheepishly as his siblings and father burst out in fits of laughter, but it was Aunt Muriel going red in the face that made it a priceless sight to see. “This! This is what I mean about your home being a circus carnival, Molly!”
Step four: while Fred was on the floor, he took a dungbomb from beneath his jumper, unwrapped it, and quickly placed it under Muriel’s chair so he could get back into his seat before it went off.
“Auntie Muriel, it was only an accident,” Fred explained innocently as he set the plate back on the table and surreptitiously wiped his hands clean on his trousers. Step five was complete: deniability.
George counted down in his head from seven then looked to his brother and grinned broadly. The dungbomb went off right as planned, smelling faint at first, but growing stronger by the second.
“Oh Merlin’s beard, what is that smell!” Aunt Muriel sounded distressed and covered her face with her napkin. “Molly, do something about that dreadful smell!”
George’s siblings all knew what the smell was, and what would happen in a moment, and quickly bailed away from the table to rush to the back door and out into the garden, most without coats or extra jumpers. The twins laughed as they went too, snatching up their coats on the way out the door with their dad right on their heels to avoid the smell and the mum hollering after them.
“Alright, which one of you did it?” their dad asked, though he didn’t particularly seem upset.
No one admitted it, of course, including Fred and George. That would be suicide with their mum’s rule about dungbombs in the house!
“Get in here and clean up, all of you,” their mum declared from the doorway a few minutes later. “Your Aunt Muriel has left and refuses to come to Christmas dinner ever again. Fred and George, I hope you’re proud of yourselves for traumatizing an old woman.”
The twins just grinned and went inside to clear the table. The smell wasn’t too bad once you got used to it, better than boiled cabbage at any rate, and it was worth it if it meant no more Aunt Muriel at Christmas!
***
George woke in the darkness of his bedroom at the Burrow, startled into consciousness by a painfully vivid dream. He rubbed his eyes as his sight adjusted to the faint moonlight and looked to his right at Fred’s empty bed, sighing when he realized that once again it had just been a dream. Fred was gone. His twin was never going to come back, except in the dreams George had every night. For the first time in his life, George was alone.
Seven months and twenty-two days had passed since Fred’s death. George had spent most of that time lost in his own thoughts, sometimes at the Burrow, sometimes in his and Fred’s flat above the shop in Diagon Alley, but always on his own. The rest of his family was around, they had felt Fred’s loss too, but none of them could understand just how alone he was. It wasn’t just that he’d lost his brother, his twin, that night in Hogwarts’ Castle; George had lost a piece of himself. Like Fred, that piece would never come back.
In the darkness, George couldn’t look at the empty bed anymore. He purposely turned against habit and got out of bed on the opposite side so he didn’t have to look at Fred’s side of the room on his way out. Everyone was home for the holiday, but the Burrow was silent and empty in the earliest hours of the morning. George welcomed the quiet because it meant he didn’t have to pretend. There was no one to reassure he was fine, he didn’t need to smile or joke with Ginny, he could just be the broken half of himself and there was no one to pity him.
A whispered word set the fireplace alight with a low flame and threw shadows around the room, the corners hidden away but most of the room lit enough to manage. Above the mantle, his mum’s clock was illuminated: all but two hands pointed towards ‘bed,’ and his own tilted the opposite direction at ‘home.’ Fred’s was the only one oriented vertically, forever ‘lost.’ George looked away with a sigh and sat on the floor in front of the tree, a blanket from the sofa around his shoulders as he poked the packages that everyone knew would be their yearly jumpers. He counted carefully, his breath caught in his throat when he reached nine and counted again, then once more to be certain. She had to have made one for Fred. A quick reveal charm showed that she had marked each package with a letter and he took the present marked ‘F’ and held it to his chest tightly. He wasn’t going to cry, he’d spilled all his tears months before, but that didn’t help the tightness in his chest. It hurt more than anything George had ever suffered, rivaling even the day that Fred was buried, with a low, throbbing ache deep in his soul.
Everyone had said that it would get better in time, that he would heal, but they didn’t know anything. How was he supposed to heal when half of him was gouged out and stolen away? Time wasn’t going to heal that wound. He ripped into the wrapping, throwing the discarded paper into the fire and holding Fred’s jumper tightly in his grasp. There was no one to wear it – come the morning he would have his own that his mother expected him to wear, but what would come of Fred’s jumper? It would have sat unopened beneath the tree, a reminder to all of them that they were missing the most important piece of their family (at least in George’s eyes), and his mum will cry and push them all away to go compose herself in the kitchen – he’s seen the same scene play out too many times over the last few months to expect anything different. The jumper was in his hands, though, and that meant the reminder didn’t have to be there for everyone. The reminder was always there for George, though, and so he tugged it on over his head and sunk into the warmth as he retreated to the sofa with the blanket.
The fire flared as the wrapping burned and the flames twisted into impossible shapes as they disappeared up the chimney. “I miss you, Freddy,” he whispered quietly to the empty room.
The only answer was the crackle of the fire as the last of the paper burned brightly before it too faded to embers.
***
Author:
kingzgurlCharacter(s): George Weasley, Fred Weasley
Prompt:
mini_fest 2012 - Christmas without FredWord Count: 3,085
Rating: PG
Contains (Highlight to view): *Character Death, canon*
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Christmas was always memorable at the Burrow, but then a year came when it all changed.
***
The first Christmas that George really remembered was one of the more memorable Weasley family Christmases. He remembered he was young, but he must have been five or so because Ginny was definitely there, even if she was only a baby.
That was the year their mum had mixed up the presents for him and Fred, and he had gotten Fred’s mittens and jumper, and Fred had gotten his. They had both giggled and put them on anyway because there were few things better than confusing their parents and siblings by calling each other the wrong names throughout the day.
They had also gotten the best present that year – a broomstick! It was smaller than Charlie and Bill’s brooms, and it didn’t go nearly as high, but they could get a few feet off the ground with the both of them on it, and to them that meant it was the best thing ever! They had immediately tried to use it indoors and their mum had shouted at them a bit until she told them to take it outside for a go. Of course they had to bundle up first because there was cold and snow, but because she was mum she didn’t understand that they needed to try it out right then.
She’d even let them stay out in the garden until dinner: flying in circles and tumbling off into huge drifts of snow, going as fast as they could (which in reality wasn’t very fast but to a five year old it felt like a thousand kilometers a minute) and seeing which one could hold on longer, and trying their best to coax the little broom over the garden wall to explore beyond (sadly they never quite made it). Even with the smell and lure of dinner, it was a hard fought argument to stay out and play with their pink cheeks and numb noses.
After supper, when they were too full on Christmas pudding to think about going out again, the twins played with their new exploding snap cards. The last set had exploded rather violently a few weeks before Christmas and was unusable – the twins still swore they didn’t do anything to tamper with the exploding charm, but they may have spent an entire Tuesday poking and prodding at them with toy wands while they tried to figure out how to make them explode on command.
Everyone was distracted with their own toys and presents that no one really paid any attention to Ron crawling out of the room, even their mum was napping on the sofa and didn’t notice. Until there was a loud crash in the hall and Ron’s wailing cry. For whatever reason everyone looked at the twins first – as if things are always their fault! – before they all rushed to the hallway to see Ron on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with broken bits of wood and bristles around and under him. Their broomstick!
“RON!” Fred and George shouted in unison with their mum, who rushed towards the toddler while the twins just looked on heartbroken at the fate of their favorite toy. It was like she cared more about Ron, who was fine and didn’t look hurt at all, than she did about their shattered broomstick!
“Mum! He broke our broom!” tears burned George’s eyes, but he wasn’t going to cry, he wasn’t!
“Shush, Fred,” their mum called over her shoulder as she hugged Ron and took him back to the sitting room to give him the new stuffed teddy bear he had gotten that morning.
“But dad!” Fred argued, appealing to their other parent who didn’t seem quite as concerned over Ron’s crash.
Their dad sighed, “George, let’s just find out if your brother is okay and then we’ll look at the broom.”
George could feel just how angry Fred was next to him and that put a stop to his tears that threatened to fall. Fred was always the one who got angry when Ron stole their toys, far more so than the annoyed that George usually was about the same incident, but he’d never seen his twin quite this angry. He was glad that his brother could be angry enough for the both of them.
“No! It’s not fair!” Fred stomped back into the room with George on his heels. “He’s always taking our things and breaking them!”
“Stop shouting,” their mum shushed them again, and that was when Fred snapped.
George felt the explosion of magic, and it surprised him as much as it surprised Fred and everyone else in the room. For a second it was like nothing happened, and then Ron’s new teddy bear turned into a teddy bear-sized spider: black and hairy with eight creepy legs and big pincher teeth, and it crawled and wriggled in Ron’s arms until he screamed bloody murder and threw it across the room in a panic.
Everyone else was stunned, shocked at what Fred had done, until their dad had flicked his wand at it and turned it back into the teddy bear it was before it had been transfigured.
“C’mon,” George whispered and tugged at Fred’s sleeve, “mum’s gonna shout.”
Ron screamed louder still, refusing to even look at the stuffed bear, and caused such a ruckus that it got everyone’s attention back on him and gave the twins the chance to escape. They stopped in the hall only long enough to pick up the largest pieces of their broomstick before they ran up to their room and hid for the rest of the night.
Six rolls of spellotape and two days later, they declared the broom a lost cause and had permanently blown up their new deck of exploding snap cards (successfully singing off Ron’s eyebrows in the process).
***
The best Christmas gift ever, George thought, was when he and Fred were nine and unintentionally (or purposely, depending who you asked) gave the entire Weasley family a great gift with the help of Charlie and Bill (who would never admit to taking part).
There was a rule in the Burrow, made by their mum when the twins were seven, which said they were not allowed to have dungbombs in the house. Naturally, they had quite the stash hidden away and refreshed often with packages from Bill and Charlie after Hogsmeade weekends and visits to Zonko’s. On Christmas morning the best gifts were not the ones under the tree (though they did love their jumpers and the more ‘acceptable’ Zonko’s gifts), but the one in the plain brown box on the desk in their room when they woke up – dungbombs and stink pellets! Enough to last them until the Easter holidays when their oldest brothers would be home again with another box full of birthday presents!
Since the no-dungbomb rule was enforced, the twins had been careful not to get caught with them. Rather than just drop and run, like they had done when they were younger and less wise, dungbomb and stink pellet placement became strategy. Beneath Ron’s bed was always an acceptable location for a dungbomb. Under his pillow while he slept was even better for the stink pellets.
After presents were opened on Christmas morning and everyone settled in with their new toys (Percy got a book - a book!), Fred and George were huddled in the corner nearest the fire with a healthy stash of sugar quills and licorice wands to last them through their scheming. With Percy home for the holidays they had only a limited time to hide stink pellets among his things, and it required careful thought as George sucked on a sugar quill.
The surprisingly quiet morning in the Burrow was interrupted by the arrival of their Great Aunt Muriel, and the twins could only groan quietly and hide as long as possible before they had to great her.
“There you two are – I was starting to think that Molly had come to her senses and had the pair of you shipped off to a school for naughty boys!”
George stood next to his brother and did his best to smile as he hugged her awkwardly in greeting. “Happy Christmas.” Aunt Muriel always smelled like boiled cabbage that had been overboiled and left on a bit too long, and George knew that when he escaped her grasp the smell would have transferred to him and his new jumper (which actually had his own name on it!) and would make him uncomfortable for the rest of the night. No one wanted to smell like boiled cabbage!
“Shoo now,” she told them a minute later after she had released both of them. “The adults have things to talk about.”
They couldn’t get away soon enough and scurried back to their corner to scheme.
George couldn’t hear what Muriel was talking about with their mum in the kitchen, but he didn’t care much either, until they were called for dinner an hour later. A plan was firmly in effect, but it would begin with a quick trip upstairs to their room.
“We’re going to go wash up, mum. Be right back!” George called over his shoulder as they took the stairs two at a time in their haste to fetch what they needed from their Christmas stash.
With all the commotion getting settled in at the table, it didn’t seem that anyone had noticed their late entrance, which was for the best as they took their seats across from Aunt Muriel. Ron had the unfortunate luck of being seated next to her this year, which he rightfully deserved in George’s mind. Just before Halloween he’d stolen some of the twins’ best Chocolate Frog cards and took them to show off to the boy down the lane, then lost them somewhere along the way. Fred had been catching spiders and hiding them in Ron’s room ever since.
Dinner started out fairly uneventfully, until Aunt Muriel started in with being mean to everyone at the table. “Bill really ought to have a haircut. I almost confused him for a daughter of yours.”
“Arthur, you should ask the ministry for a raise. I have no idea how you will afford to send the rest of your offspring away to school in a few years time.”
“Molly, don’t forget that your youngest is a girl and should be dressing more like a lady than another boy.”
The longer it went on, the more Fred grew twitchy at his side. George could tell that his twin was dying to say something to shut her up, but it was too soon. The plan called for them to wait a bit longer.
“Do we have to wait?” Fred murmured around a mouthful of mashed parsnip.
“It’s almost time,” George reminded him as he leaned over to steal the last of the turkey from his brother’s plate. It was part of the plan, after all, but no one batted an eye at the common action of one twin taking food from the other’s plate. No one, that was, except Aunt Muriel.
“Honestly! Can’t you boys be civilized for a meal and eat from your own plate?” George didn’t understand why it upset her so much.
“I’ll clear plates,” Fred announced suddenly, step two of the plan, and stood quickly to snatch his plate off the table and unbalance George who had still been tipped to the side. Among his flailing not to fall (a particularly good acting job, in George’s opinion), he knocked the plate out of Fred’s careless grip. Step three was in effect as the plate fell, landing perfectly on Fred’s foot so as not to break but with enough force to scatter his fork and knife. “Oops!”
George grinned sheepishly as his siblings and father burst out in fits of laughter, but it was Aunt Muriel going red in the face that made it a priceless sight to see. “This! This is what I mean about your home being a circus carnival, Molly!”
Step four: while Fred was on the floor, he took a dungbomb from beneath his jumper, unwrapped it, and quickly placed it under Muriel’s chair so he could get back into his seat before it went off.
“Auntie Muriel, it was only an accident,” Fred explained innocently as he set the plate back on the table and surreptitiously wiped his hands clean on his trousers. Step five was complete: deniability.
George counted down in his head from seven then looked to his brother and grinned broadly. The dungbomb went off right as planned, smelling faint at first, but growing stronger by the second.
“Oh Merlin’s beard, what is that smell!” Aunt Muriel sounded distressed and covered her face with her napkin. “Molly, do something about that dreadful smell!”
George’s siblings all knew what the smell was, and what would happen in a moment, and quickly bailed away from the table to rush to the back door and out into the garden, most without coats or extra jumpers. The twins laughed as they went too, snatching up their coats on the way out the door with their dad right on their heels to avoid the smell and the mum hollering after them.
“Alright, which one of you did it?” their dad asked, though he didn’t particularly seem upset.
No one admitted it, of course, including Fred and George. That would be suicide with their mum’s rule about dungbombs in the house!
“Get in here and clean up, all of you,” their mum declared from the doorway a few minutes later. “Your Aunt Muriel has left and refuses to come to Christmas dinner ever again. Fred and George, I hope you’re proud of yourselves for traumatizing an old woman.”
The twins just grinned and went inside to clear the table. The smell wasn’t too bad once you got used to it, better than boiled cabbage at any rate, and it was worth it if it meant no more Aunt Muriel at Christmas!
***
George woke in the darkness of his bedroom at the Burrow, startled into consciousness by a painfully vivid dream. He rubbed his eyes as his sight adjusted to the faint moonlight and looked to his right at Fred’s empty bed, sighing when he realized that once again it had just been a dream. Fred was gone. His twin was never going to come back, except in the dreams George had every night. For the first time in his life, George was alone.
Seven months and twenty-two days had passed since Fred’s death. George had spent most of that time lost in his own thoughts, sometimes at the Burrow, sometimes in his and Fred’s flat above the shop in Diagon Alley, but always on his own. The rest of his family was around, they had felt Fred’s loss too, but none of them could understand just how alone he was. It wasn’t just that he’d lost his brother, his twin, that night in Hogwarts’ Castle; George had lost a piece of himself. Like Fred, that piece would never come back.
In the darkness, George couldn’t look at the empty bed anymore. He purposely turned against habit and got out of bed on the opposite side so he didn’t have to look at Fred’s side of the room on his way out. Everyone was home for the holiday, but the Burrow was silent and empty in the earliest hours of the morning. George welcomed the quiet because it meant he didn’t have to pretend. There was no one to reassure he was fine, he didn’t need to smile or joke with Ginny, he could just be the broken half of himself and there was no one to pity him.
A whispered word set the fireplace alight with a low flame and threw shadows around the room, the corners hidden away but most of the room lit enough to manage. Above the mantle, his mum’s clock was illuminated: all but two hands pointed towards ‘bed,’ and his own tilted the opposite direction at ‘home.’ Fred’s was the only one oriented vertically, forever ‘lost.’ George looked away with a sigh and sat on the floor in front of the tree, a blanket from the sofa around his shoulders as he poked the packages that everyone knew would be their yearly jumpers. He counted carefully, his breath caught in his throat when he reached nine and counted again, then once more to be certain. She had to have made one for Fred. A quick reveal charm showed that she had marked each package with a letter and he took the present marked ‘F’ and held it to his chest tightly. He wasn’t going to cry, he’d spilled all his tears months before, but that didn’t help the tightness in his chest. It hurt more than anything George had ever suffered, rivaling even the day that Fred was buried, with a low, throbbing ache deep in his soul.
Everyone had said that it would get better in time, that he would heal, but they didn’t know anything. How was he supposed to heal when half of him was gouged out and stolen away? Time wasn’t going to heal that wound. He ripped into the wrapping, throwing the discarded paper into the fire and holding Fred’s jumper tightly in his grasp. There was no one to wear it – come the morning he would have his own that his mother expected him to wear, but what would come of Fred’s jumper? It would have sat unopened beneath the tree, a reminder to all of them that they were missing the most important piece of their family (at least in George’s eyes), and his mum will cry and push them all away to go compose herself in the kitchen – he’s seen the same scene play out too many times over the last few months to expect anything different. The jumper was in his hands, though, and that meant the reminder didn’t have to be there for everyone. The reminder was always there for George, though, and so he tugged it on over his head and sunk into the warmth as he retreated to the sofa with the blanket.
The fire flared as the wrapping burned and the flames twisted into impossible shapes as they disappeared up the chimney. “I miss you, Freddy,” he whispered quietly to the empty room.
The only answer was the crackle of the fire as the last of the paper burned brightly before it too faded to embers.
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