Name: Chris

Title: Playing Matchmaker

Fandom: Harry Potter

Genre: General

Rating: T

Summary: Hey-I may be dead, but I still want what's best for my girl. AU. Fred centric antics in five parts. Fred/Hermione, hints of Harry/Hermione

…0…

Part 1; Happenstance

…0…

There are moments in life when you can point to a single event and say, without doubt or reservation, "That's the moment my life changed forever."

For me, that moment would have to be when I died.

There's really nothing quite as…permanent as death. Little secret? Kinda dull too.

See I always thought that when you died that was it. Here's your ticket, there's the train, one way and no stops.

Nope.

One thing I never knew is that we get a choice about whether or not we go on. You'd think that seven years around ghosts at Hogwarts would teach me a thing or two. We don't get to go back obviously. Believe you me-if I had the option to be alive again, I'd be on it so fast it would be like nothing had ever happened.

I woke up…or at least I think I woke up. I'm not entirely sure what to call it. One second I was in Hogwarts while the battle raged around me, and then I blinked. Everything was gone; the castle was deserted and there was a ghostly gray tinge to the stone walls and the paintings. And no one, not a soul was around. Save for myself of course.

Getting to the Great Hall wasn't a conscious decision. Heck, I'm not sure I can even be considered 'conscious' at this point. Eh. Semantics. There just seemed to be something pulling me there.

There were other people in the Hall. Some I knew, some I didn't. Colin Creevy was there, sitting at what would be Gryffindor table in the real castle. And when the witch that sat at the front of the room under the Sorting Hat stood and walked towards a door behind her to the right, he got up and took her seat. Only scant seconds past before he stood and walked through the same door without a word or look back to anyone around him.

Was this a joke? I know jokes and this didn't seem like any I'd ever conceived of. Getting sorted for the afterlife just seemed a little…easy. Who-or what-exactly did the sorting anyway? And where did the doors go? One side Heaven, the other Hell?

Then it was my turn. No one had to tell me; there wasn't a professor MacGonagall standing at the front of the room with a roll of parchment checking off names one by one. The few people that were there before me were gone, the only person-soul? spirit?-there besides me came in after I did.

Guess my turn was unavoidable. Unlike last time, I really wasn't looking forward to it.

Whoa. Déjà vu. Being sorted again is weird. Just plain weird.

What did I expect? Hard to say. The real Sorting Hat kind of probes around in your mind; filtering out what you like, your interests, asks you questions. This one didn't do any of that. Instead it shows me pictures. Past, present, future perhaps. But they were real-I could feel it in my bones. You know, if they're still actually real bones and all.

I saw my mum. Crying. Sobbing in that way only a person who had just lost something she held dear could. My dad, silent tears making their way down his face. Whatever resides where my heart was when it was still beating clenches. God. That kind of pain…it's pretty painful to watch it. Especially when you're the cause of it.

George was next and I knew that was going to be tough to see. He is my twin after all, pretty much my other half. He hurts, I hurt. And vice versa.

There was absolutely no color in his face. He looked lost. Simply…lost. Like he didn't know what to do. I'm pretty sure that's the way I would've felt had the situation ended up the other way. The feeling when I saw him with all that blood on his face, lying so still, resonates pretty deep-even if it was just an ear. I hate that I've done this to him.

But it wasn't like it was my fault.

The rest of the crowd wasn't exactly pleasant to see; Harry, Ginny, my brothers, Lee. It didn't exactly fill me with warm fuzzies that this was going to be my last image of them, yet there wasn't anything I could do about it.

Nice to know I'd be missed though.

Then I saw Hermione.

Oh god, Hermione. I've never seen someone look so utterly devastated in my life-or rather, existence now I guess. There's not a word o describe how destroyed she looked sitting there against the wall of the Great Hall, her hands folded limply in her lap, face expressionless and white as a sheet. And her eyes…that light that was always there in her big brown eyes was gone, like someone had flipped a switch and turned it off. A single tear slipped its way down her ashen cheek. When her hand made no move to wipe I away I glanced down at it. (How, I'll never know.)

That was when her ring caught my attention. Nothing special really. Just a simple silver band with a tiny little heart engraved in the middle. It was all I could afford at the time and I promised, promised, I'd get her a real one some day.

I wasn't going to get a someday. But seeing Hermione that way; so lost, with the ring I gave her two years ago, it made me determined that she was going to get her someday. Even if I wouldn't get o be the guy who gave it to her.

With my goal decided, the hat floated away from me and I walked purposefully towards the door that no one before me had gone through. I knew instinctively that it would take me where I needed to go.