Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
Split
By: ChoCedric
George, along with his brothers, carries Fred's mahogany casket to where the grave diggers have already dug a hole. He can't believe that this is happening, that he has to say goodbye to his brother, his twin, his partner-in-crime, his best friend. He doesn't know whether he will ever open Weasley's Wizard Wheezes again, whether he will ever smile again, whether he will ever joke again. All he knows now is that his everything, half of him, is going to be put in the ground and left to rot.
All around him, his family stands, in varying states of grief. His mother is hardly able to stand, leaning all her weight on his father. Tears are pouring down her face, screams of "Nooooo, Freddie, noooooooo," escaping her mouth. "Not my baby, not my baby!" Arthur is stroking her back, trying to offer her all the comfort he can. Bill has his arms around Fleur, both of them weeping quietly into each other. Hermione is sobbing on Ron's shoulder, while the latter stands stony-faced and silent. Charlie is standing with Percy, Charlie looking grief-stricken and Percy with tears streaming down his usually pompous face. Ginny is softly crying into Harry's hair while he stands there, looking as though this is entirely his fault.
As the casket is lowered into the ground, George feels his own tears falling thick and fast down his cheeks. He feels his heart rip, as though someone has taken a saw and cut it in half. He will never finish, or have Fred finish, his sentences again, and he will never plot pranks to pull on Percy again.
And that brings his mind to another thought. How dare Percy be the one to have heard Fred's last words, to have been with him in his final moments. Percy was the one who deserted the family, he had no right! If anyone had the right to be with Fred at his dying breath, George did, he thinks furiously. To see him lifeless and still in the Great Hall, his sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling, literally tore his heart in two.
"Oh, Georgie," his mother whispers, going to stand by him and putting an arm around him. Dirt is starting to be piled on top of the casket by the family, but both George and his mother don't feel strong enough to help. It is as though if they take that final step and perform that final act, it will make Fred's death completely irreversible.
George buries his face in his mother's shirt and screams, screams so loudly and so painfully that it forms a crack in everyone's souls. Nobody else in the family understands how it feels to lose a twin, to lose a soulmate. He howls with grief, and he'd like nothing better than to lie in that hole with Fred, to tear the lid of that box open and become one with him. The tears still fall nonstop, and his screaming is the sound that permeates the graveyard. "I WANT MY BROTHER!" he moans over and over again, and his soul feels as though there is a huge void in it, a huge chasm that will never be filled again.
And that is the moment George never forgets as he continues his miserable life. That day, when they buried Fred, they buried half of himself. He can't even bring himself to visit his brother's grave, for the name Fred Weasley and a headstone is a cheap, awful way of describing the person who completed George in every way possible. Now, he is forever split, forever shattered, and he will never be that fun-loving, pranking, laughing, joking George again. For the one person he loved above all others, the one person who he just can't live without, is gone.
