Buried Memories

Tonight the moon is steeped low in the sky, yellow and pitted with scars. It's cold but somehow I'm sitting at the foot of the largest oak tree in the woods by our home. It's been years but I still knew the exact spot to dig by the knot at the base of the ancient wood, the thick green of the leaves it wears.

It didn't take me long to find it, but then, we didn't bury it particularly deep. The little red tin seemed smaller somehow, and so battered it seemed once again smooth. I haven't opened it yet. I've thought about it, even going so far as to run the tips of my fingers along the closed jaw of the lid, but I can't open it. It's not that I don't want to; far from it. It's just that I've been trying so hard to drive out every memory you and I ever made that to open it will just undo all that I've achieved so far.

It was your idea to bury it. I remember that much. It was the summer before we joined Hogwarts, the lazy kind of day where hours can be lost simply by watching the heat rising from the cracked surface of the roads. We were in the garden, just you and I, bored and makeshift bowling by throwing rocks at the gnomes. And then, all of a sudden, you turned to me and said, "Let's make a time capsule," as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if you couldn't believe we'd never thought of it before. You'd heard some Muggle children in the village talking about them, and decided to make one of your own.

It's been years but I remember every single thing we put into this little tin.

A handful of Knuts I'd collected that had been wedged in the seam of the paving stones in Diagon Alley, slipped between the cushions of the sofa in our living room, glimmering in the parched yellow grass of our garden, so that when we dug it up in thirty years time we could laugh at how funny money used to look.

Three of our best Famous Witches and Wizards Cards, their smiling faces marred a little by the dried remnants of the Chocolate Frogs that had housed them, to remind us who had been our heroes in childhood, so that we could see if any of them had lived up to their secret challenge.

A Puffskein plush toy, the slick colour of thick gold treacle, in memory of the one we stole from Ron to use for Quidditch practice and a reminder to buy him a replacement when we opened this capsule, when the two of us were older, fatter and rich.

A slip of paper from each of us, on which we'd scrawled our own hopes for our futures. We planned to open them, to see if they had come true. I never knew what yours said. You covered your slip with your hand when I tried to look, so that all I saw was the map of freckles that dusted your arms, so that for the first time ever there was a secret between us, one we didn't and couldn't share. But I insisted that I show you mine, thinking that if you wanted to create distance then I would simply fill the space between us with my words and my hopes, so that there was nothing there but ourselves.

We kept adding to the pile until the tin was filled, and then we asked Bill, who had come of age last November, to Charm it sealed, to protect it from the ravages of time and weather. The plan was to open it in thirty years time, together. We were going to laugh over it, together, and take it home to show our children, so that they could plant a capsule of their own.

As you can see, the plan has changed somewhat.

I sigh now and draw my legs up to my chest, staring up at the night sky. It's bright tonight, as if someone has upended a bucket of sequins over a pure black drape. The air is perfectly still, but it feels charged, as though someone is listening, even though I'm not saying a word, even though I haven't said a word in a long time.

Things have changed in the time since. I've grown my hair long, partly so that it covers the place where my ear used to be. It's not quite as long as Bill's but its long enough that Mum's started nagging me about it, which is the main reason I've let it grow, if I'm honest. I never thought I'd say this, and you'd die of shock if you knew, but I actually missed her nagging. She didn't do it for a long time after…after everything. She didn't do much of anything, really. She seemed…shrunken, somehow, and she was so quiet. It was all because of you, of course, not that you're to blame.

A smile wreathes my face unexpectedly as a fragment of memory surfaces. Mum had just found another stack of order forms for Weasley's Wizard Wheezes and destroyed our entire stockpile of prototypes. You waited until she had huffed her way downstairs and then you turned to me, your face set into a mask of frustration. I bet, you said solemnly, that when she dies she'll come back as a ghost, just so she can haunt us. I remember the way you smiled as you spoke, the way I could hear your laughter in the spaces between the syllables. I think Mum half wishes you'd come back as a ghost, just so she can speak to you. Sometimes I wish it too.

Everyone kept apologising to me at the funeral, and I wanted to laugh, though it wasn't funny at all. I wanted to laugh because I know you would have. It just seemed utterly ridiculous all of a sudden. They kept telling me I'm sorry for your loss, the sympathy catching between their teeth so that I could see their pity when they smiled, and I wanted to laugh, because they looked so dutiful it was as though they were taking the blame onto their own shoulders, apologising to me as if it were their personal fault that you aren't here anymore.

Loss. I hate that word now. People keep calling you lost, as if you were a set of keys and not a person, and I want to tell them to shut up, because you're not lost. I know exactly where you are, and that's what makes it harder. If you were lost, I'd be happier, because I could keep on hoping that one day you'd come back.

Some nights I wake up, the pulse of the questions that throb in my head filling me so that they are all I can hear over the beat of my heart. Can I still call myself a twin even though there's only me? And, if I can, how can I say we are identical anymore, when your face is changing even as I sit here now, when your freckles are congealing? Is it right to carry on with Wizard Wheezes without you, when it was your idea, your dream more than mine? I don't even know how often to visit you, because the concept is so new. I was your shadow, literally – wherever you went I followed, whatever idea you created I enacted with you – so what happens when the shadow is all that is left? What happens when you lose a part of yourself so huge that what is left is simply the imprint of a person?

I've thought about performing a Memory Charm on myself, but I don't know how to make one strong enough to erase everything. If I remove every memory of you, I won't know who I am anymore, because I don't have a single memory that doesn't directly involve you. If I remove you, I remove myself, but I have already seen that this equation does not work, because you have been removed and I have not.

It's been hours now but I'm still sitting here. I have no idea what time it is, or how long exactly I have been squatting beneath this tree. The mound of freshly dug earth beside me is large, despite the shallowness of the tin's burial spot, and suddenly I can't look at it anymore, because all I see when I do is the mountain of earth besides your grave, I can't look at the tin because it is your coffin, and yet all I want is to rip it open for one last look. I seize the little tin, my heart thundering in my ears, and prise it open, the thin metal singing as it is forced open for the first time in a decade. It is all still there - the Puffskein, the Knuts, the little model broomstick that was my favourite toy.

I move aside the relics of my childhood with trembling fingers and suddenly a lump has formed in my throat, because lying at the base of the tin are the notes you and I made. Mine is on the top. I skim over it quickly, reading my chicken –scratch writing; I have never got on with quills. I don't need legible handwriting though. I remember every familiar line of the page, as though as I wrote I preserved the words in my heart as well as on the paper. I will be rich. I will be famous. I will have a smiling wife who cooks me eggs for my breakfast every day. I will have ten children. I place mine carefully back in the tin and hold yours to my eyes, squinting a little in the poor light so that I can read the words inscribed there. My written predictions, my childish hopes, were an essay in comparison to your note. There is a single sentence there – just eight simple words, your one wish for the future.

I will still be able to do this.

I frown, confused. Still be able to do what? The corner of the little slip is bent a little, so that I can see the brightest flash of blue; I turn the note over. It is a photograph. You and I stand in our little garden, the sky a strip of perfect azure above us. We are around eight years old, smiling and pulling faces at whoever is taking the picture, and a look of pride crosses your features even as you waggle your tongue at the camera and cross your eyes maniacally. Your arm is firmly slung around my shoulders, and you pull me closer to you as if to make it all the clearer that, for all intents and purposes, we are the same person.

Suddenly I can't see for the tears in my eyes, and at last I recognise the thick lump in my throat for what it is; I am choking on the memories of you, on every single recollection I have tried to banish. I can't breathe because it hurts so much to think that your prediction never came true. I clutch the photograph to my chest and I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the tide of memory that surges within me, as I count up all the chances that were lost to us forever.

I am still holding the photo when the sun strains weakly through the thin grey clouds of morning. I am still sitting beneath this tree as it rises properly and the sky fades from deepest indigo to a brilliant blue, and I am still here even as I hear my name being called later, ignoring the panic threaded through it. I am lost in all the memories of you and I that I have been closing my eyes to.

I will not leave this mound of tilled earth until I have recalled every instance we shared, every moment; until I have mapped each and every freckle that dotted the knot of your spine and the flesh of your cheeks; until your image is so clear in my mind and your voice so strong in my head that the only way I can be sure that you aren't really here is by putting my hand out to touch you and clutching only frail air.

I will not allow myself to ignore the memories again, because the pain of remembering somehow hurts less than the agony of trying to forget, so that I don't understand how I didn't see this before.

Author's Note

I hope I've written this clearly enough but in case I haven't this is George talking to, and about, Fred post- Deathly Hallows. I've tried to make it as canonical as possible, but I've never written as either of the twins before, so I hope I've done a good job. Anyway, don't forget to let me know your thoughts – and if you liked this, please review it instead of just clicking Favourite or Alert (even though it's a oneshot).

Thanks,

Dogstar - Ebony

Update 11/11/08 - I have partially rewritten part of this story (only a couple of sentences and words) and would like to thank nevillesgirlfriend for her insightful comments.