In Memoriam, Part One: Only a Half

To: Fred Weasley

From: George Weasley

Every time I talk now, I expect to hear you. I expect for you to finish what I've started to say, and vice-versa. It's what we've done for nineteen years after all. We're two halves: never whole without the other. You're probably feeling the same way where ever you happen to be.

I spoke to Mum the other day and, not fully knowing it, stopped speaking in the middle of my sentence. The words simply hung there as she looked at me anxiously. But after several seconds I suppose she could see that I was waiting as well and pulled me into another hug. She's been doing that a hell of a lot lately and it's definitely not helping. In fact I was tempted to place a dungbomb in the kitchen if she did it again.

For spirit-lifting purposes only, of course.

By the way, you should've seen her against Bellatrix Lestrange! Down right brilliant, if you ask me. You would've loved it, we all did.

You know, ever since that night, the family's been planning funeral upon funeral, naturally starting with yours. What the point, really, of a funeral? No one ever actually celebrates a person's life at them, though we're always told to. No, we're there to mourn.

But who the bloody hell would want to go and do a thing like that? Surely, not the two of us.

Come to think of it, I reckon you're the only one who di-- …went out that night with a smile.

Sorry bout that, it's been hard to say that word as of late.

It was a fitting service, by the way. Auntie Muriel even stormed out in the middle of my eulogy, raving her wrinkled old head off. Serves her right, grumbling about how ungrateful you were from the moment she arrived. Perhaps she didn't appreciate the fireworks and loud cheering. All I know is that we got a great lot of grins and laughs out of a crowd one last time. Isn't that what really matters?

Isn't that how to celebrate the best twenty years two brothers could spend side by side?

You weren't buried either, not with the 50-some-odd people who went out fighting that night. That was my doing as well, just as you said you wanted it. You were, of course, cremated and given a proper, and very miniscule burial behind Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, in a flower bed. I figured you'd want to watch over the store, or in this case, under it.

But you still have a memorial tomb with the others; mum and dad wouldn't have it any other way. They at least let the rest of us -- meaning Ginny, Ron, Charlie, Bill, Percy, Harry, Hermoine, Lee, and myself -- pick what to say on your epitaph. Now, we all knew this wouldn't be easy, that was obvious. How exactly do you sum up a whole person in that tiny bit of space?

We each wrote our own, to compare and vote, which had been Hermoine's idea. A day later, we all came together with our own renditions of a brilliant epitaph. Lee's wasn't near proper enough for a public memorial, no matter how much we both liked it; Percy's was incredibly bland; Ginny's was touching but far too sad; Ron, Charlie, and Bill were positively at a loss; mine was apparently worse than Lee's; Hermoine's was more a biography than anything; but it was Harry's that stood out and won over.

And all he did was pass me a blank piece of parchment.

Dad laughed and agreed with our decision on the epitaph. Mum called it "…fitting".

And so here it is, your memorial marker, the first in the field and next to Remus and Tonk's double headstone. I'm the last one here today. Figured I'd--

…see? I'll never get used to this.

I suppose I'll never be used to being one half.

Fred Weasley
1978 - 1998

Beloved son.
Devoted brother and friend.

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

FIN.