1. Lost


George

George would have liked to think he was more heroic in the face of death than he really was.

In truth, there was nothing about the days immediately following Fred's death that stuck in his mind. He must have existed during those days - people must have offered condolences. George must have cried. There must have been celebrations in the midst of the funerals. So many people had died, and yet You-Know-Who - Voldemort, as everyone was finally free to say - had just met his end. It must have been a relief to be at the end of the reign of terror.

He must have buried Fred.

Yet George remembered none of it. It was almost as if he had to relearn how to do something as basic as form memories.

He had been staying at the Burrow - he'd decided that the flat above Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes was far too empty. But he slowly realized that the Burrow was far too crowded. His mother always wanted to talk about something or other; Ron awkwardly avoided him; his father made him feel like he was under constant silent scrutiny. He never saw Ginny.

As the only two homes he'd ever had were unacceptable, he needed to live someplace new. The only place he could think of was the Leaky Cauldron, so that's where he went. While he was working out the details with Tom the barman, he noticed a calendar on the wall. "Is it really July?" George asked, confused that so much time had passed. It seemed that only a week ago, he was plotting a new segment for Potterwatch with Fred.

Tom glanced at the calendar. "Oh, no, sorry. I forgot to change it yesterday." And he casually flipped the month over to August.

George leaned heavily against the counter. August? Fred had been dead almost two months.

"How long'll you be wanting this room for?" Tom was asking.

George tried to get his brain working again. "Er - er - indefinitely," he said.

Tom didn't notice the hesitation. "I'll give you a weekly rate. If the rates change, I'll try to give you a week's notice." He was already putting a key on the counter.

George took the key and found his way to the room.

The room suited George's needs perfectly. It was nothing more than a bed and a desk with a mirror above it. The mirror was problematic; it wasn't long before he saw Fred out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to get a better look, Fred looked back at him, surprised and happy for the briefest of moments. As George realized what he was seeing, Fred's face fell.

George tried to cover the mirror with an old baggy jumper, but by the third time he caught a glimpse of Fred's nose or Fred's eye, he gave it up as a bad job. He went straight back downstairs to the bar and asked Tom for an extra blanket, which he used to cover the mirror completely.


Angelina

George settled into a routine: after a small breakfast in his room, he'd leave through the front door of the Leaky Cauldron, wandering the streets of Muggle London until dusk. He could sit on a bench on the edge of a busy square and watch people walk by all day. Nobody ever noticed him, and after a few hours he didn't notice himself, either. It was nice - as if he had always existed on his bench. He had no cares, no obligations. No history. Then he'd go back for dinner at the bar and retire to his room.

One evening, after successfully existing on his bench for another day, he came back to the Leaky Cauldron and found Angelina waiting for him.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," he replied.

Without another word between them, they sat down at a table and ordered food.

Angelina played with her napkin. George watched her.

A few times, she inhaled as if she were about to speak, but then she'd simply flip the napkin over in her hands and start folding it up another way.

George waited.

Finally, still staring down, she said, "Listen..." But she stopped.

"I'm all ears," George offered.

She looked up at him with one eyebrow raised. She didn't laugh, or even grin, but she did exhale and her shoulders (which had been hunched up) dropped back down to their normal level. "I want to talk to you about the joke shop."

George's stomach sank, but he wasn't sure why.

"I think you should keep it," Angelina said, and plowed on without waiting for a reply. "I don't know if you've considered it - I know you haven't sold it - I've checked - but you'll want it later, even if you don't want it now. You'll need it. It's part of who you are."

He considered her words. He couldn't feel any part of who he was at the moment. But Angelina knew him, and he trusted her.

"You're probably right. But...I can't think about it now." He hoped she understood what he meant, because he couldn't even think about it long enough to explain it.

It appeared that Angelina did understand, which was a relief. "Of course, George. Of course. But at some point, we need to look at this practically. If the shop doesn't make money, then you can't pay the rent and you'll lose it."

She paused, but George didn't have anything to say, so she continued. "If you need my help to run it while you take a break, I will. I'm no good at inventing things, but I'm a fair hand at business. I can run it."

She waited again, but George just stared at the wall behind her.

"I mean, only if you want me to." Pause again. "Please say something, George."

He thought about what she was saying and what she was offering. It seemed that she wanted to attempt the impossible, but who was he to try to stop her? He didn't want to think about any of it. So without any enthusiasm, he said, "Sure. That sounds good."

She frowned slightly, but didn't say anything. Their food arrived and they ate in silence.

When they finished their meal, George suddenly said, "Lina?"

"What?"

"What if the part of me that wanted the joke shop is gone?"

She looked at him hard. "It's not," she finally said. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. He noticed her eyes were full of tears, which he found odd. He felt nothing.

In short order, Angelina had reopened the doors of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. It wasn't a triumphant return, but the shop did a fair amount of business.

George was surprised that he couldn't stay away for long. He didn't plan for it to happen, but one day he walked in the front doors of the shop. Angelina greeted him curiously, but was pulled away by a customer. Another customer came to the register with a full basket, and eyed George expectantly. George blinked and rang up the purchases. When the customer left, he rested his hands on the counter and studied them until Angelina returned with her customer. Angelina did not act surprised when George rang up those purchases as well. She just nodded at him.

Soon he had a regular schedule - Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 3:00 till close. And then he was living in the flat above the shop, because it was cheaper and more convenient on cold rainy nights. He found that living in the flat by himself was fine, as long as he kept all the mirrors covered. As he had to do this anywhere he lived, he found he could manage.

And then it was October, and he and Angelina were full partners in the shop, running it together. He should have been pleased, but he had a strangely hollow feeling. He couldn't tell if it was because he was learning how to get on with his life without his twin, or if it was because nothing he did would ever matter again. He didn't examine it too closely. He was busy; that was enough.

He didn't have any ideas for new inventions. The shop was strictly business as usual.

On the first of November, George and Angelina stayed at the shop after closing to count inventory. They'd been cleared out pretty well for Halloween celebrations and needed to prioritize what to restock first. He was in the front of the store, and she was in the back. He had already found two boxes, stacked high on a shelf, completely full of fake wands. When he found a third hidden under the front display case, he cursed under his breath.

"Lina!" he called. "Please tell me you haven't found any more fake wands. We're completely overstocked."

He heard a muffled reply, then footsteps. "What was that?" she asked.

"I said we have too many fake w-"

He stood up and turned around, and to his surprise, Angelina was right behind him.

George was never one for candlelight or romance, but the sudden sight of Angelina took his breath away. It had been a very long time since he'd properly looked at her. Her hair, which she wore in braids in her younger days, was loose around her face, falling just past her shoulders in perfect silky black cascades. Her black eyes were soft and beautiful as she looked at him expectantly. Her skin was perfect, even though she had a smudge of dust on her forehead. She was statuesque, even as she carried a box of Skiving Snackboxes on her hip.

In short, she was beautiful.

And she wasn't stepping away from George, despite the fact that he was standing entirely too close.

And so they kissed. George couldn't quite believe it, and then he couldn't quite believe that they'd never done it before. The kiss was sweet and tentative - George barely touched one of her elbows and she still held the Snackboxes. They pulled away from the kiss and looked at each other.

Then Angelina broke into a wide grin and theatrically threw the box behind her. Their second kiss was not as tentative.

She spent the night at the shop, but they had to finish their inventory in the morning.


Fred

And so life continued. The joke shop did well enough, even though business was nothing like its booming glory days. Angelina spent most nights with George, but she kept her own flat and spent some nights there.

"I just need a little bit of independence, George. No one should spend twenty-four hours a day together," she said, and laughed as if the notion were comically odd.

George wasn't sure what to make of that. As a general rule, he refrained from thinking at all about his life or his relationships. But there was something about his current arrangement that made him uncomfortable - he just didn't want to put any effort into finding out what it was.

Toward the end of March, George's mum visited and invited George and Angelina to the Burrow in a week's time. "I'll fix dinner and make a cake - we should have fun!" she said.

"Sure, Mum, we'll be there."

"Ginny will be there, too - she'll be on her Easter holiday. And your father, of course. And if you don't mind, I'd like to invite Bill and Fleur, Percy, Ron and Hermione, and Harry."

"Why would I mind? Of course they can be there." The question took him off-guard. The whole family usually got together for any old reason - they'd all just been together for Ron's birthday, after all. Why would his mother suddenly act like George had veto power over the guest list?

His mum looked pleased. "Oh, I'm just being silly, I suppose." She smiled at him, and spent the rest of her visit catching him up on family news.

It wasn't until the worst possible moment that he realized the point of his mum's dinner was to celebrate his birthday.

He should have seen it coming, but he'd been so wrapped up in his new routine - and maybe more than a little bit purposefully ignorant of the passage of time - that he was honestly blindsided after dinner when his mum brought out the cake and set it in front of him. His gut clenched, and he realized he was a year older than Fred would ever be. He cursed his own stupidity, which had led to such a horrible epiphany in a room full of intimate strangers, and at a moment when he was in the spotlight.

So this is why Mum was worried about inviting everyone, he thought. Because this was supposed to be Fred's birthday, too.

He wanted to scream, cry, hit someone, run away. He wanted to die. His whole body seemed to be beating with his heart. He made a decision, though: he would not make a scene.

It was torture. His mum lit the candles and everyone sang "Happy Birthday," ("Happy Birthday Dear Geoooo-ooorge" made a travesty of the song's proper lyrics - he'd never heard it sung this way) and George only shook a little bit as he leaned forward to blow out the candles. He took the piece of cake that was offered to him, held the fork in his hand, and waited for the others to become preoccupied with their own pieces of cake. And then he excused himself to the bathroom.

Once out of sight of the others, he changed course and headed out the door towards the empty field. He sat down in the grass and hugged his knees to his chest.

He didn't cry. He wasn't even sure he was breathing.

Ginny found him like that, a few minutes later, and joined him silently. She sat down next to him and mimicked his pose. They didn't look at each other. She knocked her shoulder into his.

Her gesture reminded him to breathe. Soon afterwards he started crying.

Still, neither he nor Ginny spoke. They were quiet, except for their sniffles.

George had never been so glad to have a sister.

Before he was ready for it, his mum popped her head out the front door. "There you are!" she said. "What are you two doing out here? Come back inside, there's more cake!"

Ginny swallowed and said in a remarkably normal voice, "Sure, Mum. In a minute. We're just in the middle of something here."

"Okay, but don't take too long!" Their mum pulled her head back inside, but left the door open for them.

George took a few deep breaths, wiped his face on his sleeve, and stood up. Ginny did the same. She looked him in the eye for the first time that evening. "Ready?" she asked.

"Yes," he lied. They went back inside and he braved the rest of the party as best he could.

George and Angelina left sooner than his mum would have liked, but much later than he wanted. Angelina noticed his change in mood, but he wished she hadn't.

When they were back in the flat above the shop, she asked, "You okay?"

"Yeah. Fine."

"I know it's hard on you."

He didn't respond.

"So if you want to talk..."

"Lina!" he exploded, but then stopped himself, and began again with forced calm. "Lina. I don't want to talk."

She nodded, but kept on. "It might help you feel better."

"I DON'T - just … drop it."

He walked away and ignored her, hoping she'd take the hint and sleep in her own flat that night. She didn't. She slept next to him, and every time she reached out to touch him, he pulled away.

He didn't want to feel better, but he felt childish admitting it. He didn't want comfort or sympathy. He wanted his twin back. The stupidity and unfairness of the world was all suddenly too much for him.

He didn't speak a word to Angelina the next day. She tried speaking to him a few times, but he only responded with a nod or a grunt or a shrug. They ran the shop as usual, but if he needed something from Angelina, he relayed the message through their assistant.

They didn't have a moment alone together until George locked the front door of the shop as they closed for the night. He turned around and found her blocking his path. Her look was cold as steel.

"I miss him too, you know," she said.

There was something about her tone - like she was reproaching him. Like she understood - when she couldn't, how could she?

And whatever poison had been eating at him started spilling out.

"Is that why you're with me? Because I remind you of him?"

She had no reply to this, so he pressed on.

"Do you miss him less when I'm fucking you? Do you close your eyes and pretend I'm him? Oh - wait - do you leave your eyes open -"

"STOP IT, GEORGE!"

But he was so mad, he was shaking. He stomped around her without touching her and continued back toward the staircase to his flat, but Angelina yelled after him.

"I loved him!" she screamed, and he couldn't stop himself from looking back toward her. "Is it so wrong that I love you, too? I don't confuse you."

She stood where she was, arms down by her sides, hands clenched into fists. Fierce. Challenging him.

And he couldn't stand anything about his current situation. He turned away from her and spoke to the staircase. His voice was deadly calm.

"You know, sometimes you feel like my consolation prize - my twin is dead, but hey, at least I get to fuck his girlfriend. Right now, I'd rather have my twin back."

He heard her gasp, but refused to feel guilty about it. She was the one who had wanted to talk, after all. He stormed upstairs, grabbed a coat, and Disapparated. It was amazing he didn't splinch himself, since he had been focused entirely on the leaving, not the arriving. Still, he wasn't surprised when he found himself in the cemetery just outside of Ottery St. Catchpole, in front of Fred's grave.

When George returned to his flat much later that night, he was not surprised to find that Angelina was gone. It felt a bit odd when he noticed that she had cleared her things out of the bathroom, but for the moment he was glad of it. He reasoned that if he felt differently tomorrow, he could deal with it tomorrow.

But Angelina surprised him the next day. She showed up to work and stayed the entire day. She didn't seek George out for conversation, nor did she avoid talking to him when she needed to. Her voice had an odd, forced tone, and she held herself quite rigidly, but it all just confused George.

And she came back the next day, and the day after that. They didn't exchange any words that weren't work-related. After a full week of this, George finally cornered Angelina at the close of another day. "So, you're staying with the shop, then," he said in a would-be casual voice.

She sighed and looked at him. "As long as you don't sack me. I've invested a lot of myself in this shop, George." They stared at each other in silence for a few moments. Then she said, "Well, good night, then," and left.

After she was gone, George took the opportunity to really look at the shop. Now that he was paying attention, he could see what Angelina meant. She had completely reorganized the layout of the store in a way that made everything flow much better. She was in charge of the window displays and those always looked good. Posters, signs, even their advertisements in the Daily Prophet were of Angelina's design. The entire store bore her imprint. The only thing George was in charge of was the production and invention of merchandise - whatever that was worth. For the past several months, George had delegated most of the production out to the assistants, and he hadn't invented a single new product since the previous Easter, when he'd introduced Bunny Bonbons, a seasonally-themed variation on Canary Creams. In fact, merchandise was the only part of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes that remained entirely unchanged for the better part of a year.

The truth was, the shop belonged to Angelina more than it did to him. Fred - well, Fred wouldn't even recognize it.

As the first anniversary of Fred's death approached, the shop got busier and busier. George didn't put together what that was about, until the week before the anniversary, when he was working the register and counting back change to a short, elderly wizard. The man said, "It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since Voldemort fell."

George dropped the knuts he was counting, apologized quickly, and started over. The man didn't seem to notice. "What a year it's been, eh?" he continued. "We are lucky to have lived to see times like these, eh?"

George agreed and hurried to help the next customer, a witch whose arms were full of fireworks.

So the anniversary he was dreading was the same anniversary everyone else was getting ready to celebrate. "Perfect," he said out loud.

By the next day, the shop's shelves looked very picked-over. George was especially upset about this, because Angelina had tried to convince him to increase inventory a week before, but he had nixed the idea. "We'll never sell that much, Angelina! And we don't have room to store all that overstock!" he had argued.

She currently refrained from telling him that she'd told him so. This didn't improve his mood, because he knew she was thinking it.

Desperate to keep anything on the shelves, George marched to the front of the store carrying an old box of Headless Hats. Doing so, he nearly ran into two very young witches, who had parked themselves in front of the fake wands. They were discussing in earnest which would be the best, the one that turned into a rubber chicken, or the one that turned into polka-dotted underpants. George found their debate particularly irksome because these were the only two varieties of fake wands left.

He nearly ran into the girls again on his return to the back of the store. When he tripped over them a third time, he exploded.

"Bloody hell, this is the exact same rubbish that has been on our shelves for the past year! How long is it going to take you two to make one fucking decision?"

One of the girls merely looked frightened, but the other started to cry. The frightened girl grabbed the arm of the crying one and together they ran out of the store.

George stormed off and found Angelina. "Lina, I'm going on a break," he announced.

"Okay."

"Are you okay without me?"

"Sure."

And without looking back, George walked out of the shop. He walked to Gringotts, on a lark, to see how much he could withdraw at once (quite a bit, it turned out), and if he could get his money converted to Muggle money (he could). He walked out of Diagon Alley into Muggle London. He tried hailing a cab (something he'd heard about from a Muggle-born acquaintance, and that he'd always wanted to try), which was surprisingly easy.

The driver asked him where he wanted to go, and George said, "Away. Far away."

The driver took him to the airport.

George understood the theory of airplanes, and he also understood that he had quite a bit of money in his pocket. He strode inside the glass and steel building and, seeing a whole row of counters, he walked up to the nearest one. He asked the woman behind the counter if he could buy a ticket on an airplane. She frowned at him and asked him his destination, which George thought was a stupid question. "Where's the next airplane go?" he asked.

"We have a 2:36 flight to Melbourne, Australia, which has a few seats left."

"Sounds perfect," George said.

As he walked through the airport, he considered that so far today, he had made a little girl cry, walked out on a woman he might really love, and abandoned a business which had been his dream.

When he stepped on the plane, the flight attendant asked him, "How is your day going, sir?"

George barely paused before he smiled politely and said, "I've had worse."

And so, as all of England celebrated the fall of Lord Voldemort, George Weasley climbed Uluru. It was a powerfully magical place that even Muggles could feel, though they couldn't explain it. According to the pamphlet he'd found in Dingo Way (Melbourne's equivalent of Diagon Alley), Uluru was a place where the world of the living and the world of the dead came very close together - almost merged.

George could feel the souls of the dead, but he couldn't feel Fred.

He overheard some American witches talking about a similar place near where they lived, called Shiprock. Not knowing where else to go, George made his way to Sydney and tried to buy an airplane ticket to Shiprock, America. After some confusion (and after consulting several maps), he bought a ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico. From there it was a short trip to Shiprock, which was smaller but more magically intense than Uluru.

But he still couldn't feel Fred.