With a loud crack, twenty year old George Weasley apparated next to his twin brother's grave. Dumping the flowers he held on the freshly turned earth – his brother had only been buried a week earlier, and his mother hadn't let him out of her sight after the funeral lest he… Molly preferred not to think about what George might do to himself without Fred.

Sitting down, George leant against the back of a headstone, facing Fred's final resting place. He merely sat for a while. Eventually he spoke.

"The hell, Fred! You were meant to be the smart one. You had to go and get yourself killed?"

George's voice was cracking with the grief that he had until then been suppressing.

"Percy's doing the whole survivor's guilt thing, mum could barely function far a few days. Everyone's almost afraid to talk to me as if they're afraid I'll just go insane or something."

It started raining. Not just drizzling, this was proper English rain. George swore.

"Ron's off being 'consoled' by Hermione."

He made quotation marks with his fingers.

"Mum and dad are so cut up that they haven't noticed that Harry and Ginny are going at it like a bunch of teenagers."

George chuckled.

"You'd have a field day. So would I, were you still here. I have to fully articulate my thoughts these days, because you're not there to finish off my sentences. I'm going to start that chemical engineering course we were planning to do at Cambridge thanks to that wonderful bit of magic forgery Dumbledore did to get us glowing enough references. You never know when a little bit of muggle science is going to come in hand when you're running a magic joke store. It's going to be different not being an immediate novelty due to the whole twins thing. Although the missing ear will probably help that along."

George sighed and fell silent for a while.

"You would have loved the way mum reacted. She just started laying waste to the death eaters. This is the first time she's let me out of the house since the funeral. I guess she expects me to go off myself or something. Everyone's pretty depressed: Remus and Tonks were killed. Mum's been looking after Teddy, when she hasn't been bursting into tears pretty much whenever she sees me. Just looking at me makes her start crying. I don't know what I'm meant to do. What can I say? 'At least you've got one of us left'? I feel like crying whenever I see one of the photos of us. Everything just seems to reinforce the fact that we were a unit. 'Fred and George.' Now it's just 'and George'."

"What am I supposed to do, Fred?"

Eventually George stood up, saluted his brother's grave, and disapparated with another loud crack.

By that afternoon, the rain had stopped, and the sun was shining, or at least as much as it could in England. A teenage girl stepped off a bus at the bus stop next to the cemetery gates. Walking through the rows of graves, she stopped in front of the headstone George had been leaning against earlier.

Feeling the ground, she rolled her eyes, and from her bag pulled out a small picnic blanket to sit on. She then pulled out calligraphy pens, ink and a pad of paper, and started writing as she spoke.

"Well, dad, I'm almost sixteen. And I've finished fifth form. First in history, I won an award for sports, again, exceptional school service, again, and for some reason they gave me a prize for music, which was somewhat strange considering that I never actually studied music this year. I mean I was in the bands, but still. Mum thinks I lack an authority figure in my life. It's just because Tiffany gave me some Metallica and I happened to really like it. Mum's all the authority figure I need, I mean really."

She gazed around.

"I averaged a seventeen minute kilometre in my last open water race. I'm getting faster, and better at longer distances. The lacrosse is much the same, the season's more or less over so it's just more training…"

She trailed off.

"I've been asked to be in the orchestra for the upcoming LSE musical. One of the Old Girls is conducting it, and it turns out I'm the only tuba player she knows. So that should be fun. I still miss you. Half the girls at school are under the impression that you're alive, because it's just easier to refer to you as if you are. It gets a bit awkward when they ask something really pointed, and then I have to tell them the truth, because then they start apologising, and I'm just like 'it's alright, I'm over it' and everything just goes downhill from there. It's been a while. Eight and a bit years. I was going through your old tape cassettes, and you had some trippy stuff. Peter and the Wolf read by David Bowie? Wow. But yeah. Mum thinks that my consistent visiting is bordering on morbid obsession. I don't know how I'm meant to respond to that. It'd seem a little weird to say I'm talking to the air as if under the impression that you can in some way hear me. For that to happen I would have to believe in some kind of afterlife. And we both know that's impossible. I suppose I just come here because I can talk to you and you'll just listen without passing any judgement."

Ceasing her conversation with the air, she went back to writing – a Metallica song she intended to illuminate for a friend's upcoming birthday. After a while, she stood to stretch, and upon doing so, caught sight of a new grave. Walking over to it, she sat on the top of the rectangular headstone on her father's grave.

"Sorry dad."

And started reading.

Frederick Weasley

January 21 1985 – June 26 2005

Beloved son of Arthur and Molly.

Brother to William, Charles, Percival,

George, Ronald and Ginevra.

Sorely missed.

"You're new. And only twenty. That must have sucked. Have your family been visiting? I hope so. It's bad enough you're dead, it'd be worse if you were dead and lonely. And now I'm addressing a dead stranger. That's a bit hopeless."

Shaking her head, she returned to the bus stop from whence she had come.