George had never really known loss before. Sure, he'd lost people, but it was never really loss loss, like the loss of someone you barely know compared to the loss of, say, a brother. A twin. So George thinks he has never really known loss before, and thus he cannot really deal with it.

He theorises, lately, that he is one half of a whole. He has always been, and always will be, a twin. Only now he is a twin without his other half. Like one soul split in half and you've last the rest of it.

When he looks in the mirror, if he tilts his head away, he fancies he can see his brother again. He wishes the ear was the only thing to differ between them.

He has had precious little time alone after The Incident – so he uses every second of it to remember. He goes up to their room and locks their door, sits on his brother's bunk and tries to create. But the explosions sound forlorn, less somehow, than they were before. It takes him a while to remember that this is quite possibly because he now has only one ear to hear them with. But he thinks, inside, that it is the whoops of glee from his mirror image that make them this way.

He's been in the room three days now, planted in front of the mirror, going through boxes of inventions. They seem to be from a different lifetime, but he holds them up all the same. 'What about this, Fred?' he asks of the mirror, and he must be getting some sort of reply because he tweaks and fiddles until he says 'How about now?' and is satisfied with the response. Eventually he runs out of boxes, so he begins to make more. Slowly, at first, but steadily speeding up, though the absence of his brother pains him now more than ever. Everything he makes seems lacking in some way, until he loses his patience at the false-Fred and breaks the mirror. The rest of the family rush upstairs to the source of the noise, but Percy holds them back and goes in, alone.

George is shaking on the floor, and Percy hears him saying 'It's broken, it's broken'. So Percy takes his wand, heart going out to his brother, and after a few minutes he hugs George tightly and says 'It's fixed.'

More weeks pass by, and George makes more and more for his return to the shop they shared. But he cannot quite bring himself to go in, to breach the walls of their home and bring the pain of his death inside with him. Not yet. Not just yet.

It isn't until weeks later that he goes there and, after Percy drags him out of the house and, kicking and screaming, into the shop that he truly greaves. The brothers cling to each other in the middle of the shop floor, sobbing and shaking in each other's arms. It is suddenly so much harder to ignore his death in the confines of a building he practically made.

Hours later finds them kneeling on the floor, just barely calm. Percy takes George behind the counter, and places him behind the desk. On the back wall there are dozens of pictures with Fred in them, laughing and waving. George feels the phantom pain as he reaches his hand out to grab his twins arm. But he isn't there. He never will be, not ever again. And Percy points at the wall beside him, to a full length mirror on George's whole side and says 'It's fixed'.

George looks in the mirror and smiles shakily at his twin. The mirror images turn to Percy and nod, then say together, just like in the old days of Gred and Forge, 'It's fixed'