A/N: Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition - Round 12 - Kenmare Kestrels Keeper - Word Count: 1,085
Prompt: Write a dramatic story featuring the Weasleys.
George approached the casket with a mild sense of apprehension, which he forced down. He'd stayed mostly at the back of the church until now, receiving condolences when anyone could pin him down long enough to give them and skirting sidelong glances from family members whose eyes wandered constantly to the bandaging of his missing ear. They were glances that told him people were mentally reaffirming that he couldn't possibly be Fred.
No, he must be George.
Then those glances—momentarily hopeful—turn immediately disappointed and melt just as quickly into pity.
George stepped up to the corpse receptacle in which Fred lay and frowned at his brother.
"It's just like you to ruin all the good parties," George said with some levity. "I just can't take you anywhere nice."
He gestured around the church. It hadn't exactly been noisy up to that point, but an intense hush had fallen over the ranks of the beloved since George had started walked up to the front to take his turn at saying goodbye.
"Ah," George said, holding up one dramatic finger as though remembering something important. He reached into the breast pocket of his lime green blazer—"Dreadfully distasteful!" his mother had cried—and pulled out a photo of a grinning red-head with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, a few years younger, but otherwise the spitting image of the man in the casket.
"Mum said everyone was supposed to bring their favorite picture of you," George told him. He placed the photo in the casket alongside the dozens of photos of Fred that had been left by other friends and family members. "Of course, all your photos were rubbish," George said, "so I had to bring one of me."
All of the pictures of Fred seemed to recognize the one picture of George, and began silently shouting and waving emphatically to get his attention. Photo-George merely looked smug as he waved back to the Freds.
The real George smirked to himself, looking a bit less smug than his photo, but still rather pleased with himself. There were only a handful of people who might be able to tell that one of the photos was of the wrong twin, but no one who was in any sort of emotional state to look that hard.
"Infiltration complete," George said to his brother, smiling.
His smile faltered a bit as his eyes dropped to look Fred full in the face for the first time, and he struggled for a moment under the weight of the circumstances before shrugging it off by reasserting his morbid sense of humor.
"Sorry, by the way," George told his brother casually. "I've done everything I can, but mum won't let me put anything on your headstone about about you succeeding in step one of becoming a zombie. She says it's disrespectful. I tried to convince her that it's for the sake of posterity, but she's not having it. Couldn't talk her out of the make-up either," he added, waggling his eyebrows, "but she may have had a point there. I have to admit you have been looking a bit peaky since you died. Oh!"
The last exclamation was accompanied by an expression of dawning realization. "I can't believe I nearly forgot to check."
George leaned all the way over the coffin and lay his head flat against Fred's chest, eliciting several gasps from the busybodies who were watching him, perhaps expecting him to break down into tears or wail and curse futilely at the sky. They certainly weren't expecting him to get so close to Fred or to peer down the length of the casket toward his brother's shoes.
A moment later, George popped back up, shaking his head and making a tsking noise with his tongue. Amid more gasps, he drew his wand and stepped to the foot of the casket.
"Funeral directors these days have no sense of self-preservation or hilarity," George said. He was addressing Fred, but he knew others could hear him.
With his free hand, George lifted the closed end of the casket to get a better look at Fred's shoes, and then tapped them with his wand.
"Vinculous," he said, ignoring the indignant whispers from the funeral-goers behind him.
The laces of each of Fred's shoes untied themselves, then tied themselves together in the middle. Satisfied, George let the lid down once more and returned back to the top bit to face Fred.
"Just in case you achieve success in step two of becoming a zombie.," George said. "Can't be too careful."
George could hear his mother offering calming words to outraged family members behind him, but they could have been a hundred miles away for all he cared.
"Do you see what you've left me with?" George asked his brother. "Useless, humorless Weasleys. Weasleys and Prewetts who couldn't build a joke between them if they had the set-up and the punchline to rub together." He managed another smile, weaker than before, then added, "Oh, I don't have to tell you, do I? You look bored half to death, yourself."
George chortled a little, leaning on the edge of the casket with one arm while trying to avoid looking Fred full in the face again. He could feel the weight of his brother's death again, slowly settling over him like a dust cloud. He scraped the bottom of his joke barrel, trying to come up with something to stave off the terrible sensation of loss, and snorted derisively at himself when he could only come up with one—the worst morbid death-joke of all time.
But it was all he had left to beat back the impending darkness.
"I know I've told you this before, Fred," George said, voice straining as he forced himself to say the words, "but you really should get out more. You should really... get a life."
George released a sharp bark of laughter as the words finally left him, but felt himself buckle as the heaviness of Fred's death finally came crashing through his defenses. George sobbed once, then clamped his mouth shut on a second one. The church had gone deafeningly silent, and no one made a noise as George choked on his last words before dissolving under a wave of despair.
"I'll... give you half of mine."