It was that smell.
That bloody scent, wood paint laced with sugar. That was always, somehow, how Fred had smelled: like it was just another one of those late nights, exhausted from being enrolled as the day's drudges and too giddy from the touch of each other to go to sleep, one of those nights where they were up till dawn, cracking just the last drop of a potion that or tick of a toy that worked without batteries. Good memories had just seemed to… stick onto his twin.
He supposed there wasn't anything particularly special about the smell, the candied tang of his skin under his nose; he supposed it was the fact he'd never really smell it again.
He was his twin. They'd known it was taboo, and George, in the back of his mind – like his mother was scraping around there herself in search of things to bitch about – always knew something bad was going to happen to one of them. It just wasn't normal, what they were doing: not normal for wizards, or even for Muggles, the weirdest of the incompetent weird. He'd learned it as bad to kiss another man, not to mention your brother! Your twin brother, who some still said lived a good life when they didn't know half of it.
George had almost reached the conclusion Fred had been soaked through with Veela blood the rest of his big-nosed, freckled, ginger family had been missing out on. The way his skin felt under his lips, the feeling of pure, satin-like flesh – the tremor of his heart beating, a small thumping sound synced with George's – even the way his eyelids fluttered when he was embarrassed. All of it was purely too much to stay by any sort of norm.
In all honesty, once or twice, he'd caught himself doing it. Cliché as it was, he'd always found it fun, and even amusing, to say the beginning few words of a sentence, simple as they were, and have his lower-voiced twin pick up on the words as if they were written in neon upon the air in front of them.
Lately, though, he found he'd never get the other half of the sentence.
He'd started to forget them, really – what those last few words would have been. He found himself distracted from the actual sentence, focusing more so on the space where those words should've been said. The noise was alien, searing silence where Fred's voice should have been. Roomy enough to leave room for his voice, or maybe a thousand others, the sound of the joke shop creaking around him or a stray owl hooting in the inky black spans of night. But really? He didn't want anyone else filling it, the sound of safety, or owls – all he wanted was Fred to talk to him.
It was whenever he did that, when he found himself peeking from whatever chore he'd forced upon himself, in search of the only other person he'd ever met with a face as gorgeous; the man with eyes the colour of cherry-flavoured chocolate, with hands thin and impending as Mantis pincers; the man with a voice like a cello, and a touch so much like his own.
George was only an echo to a voice that would never grace his single ear again.