Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters, I just make them do things

Written for:

QLFC, Round 6: Letters, letters and more letters!
Position: Chaser 2 - write a letter to a sibling
Prompts: 1)(word) lonesome, 5)(quote) "I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't" – W. Somerset Maughan, 15)(word)willing
Word Count: 1,295

Birthday Competition: April, Characters: Write about Fred and George

Thanks to Amy (MissWitchx) for being a fabulous beta when I was panicking about this :)

So this was kind of depressing to write, but fun nonetheless. A lot of the ideas about grief were inspired by The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, which is quite possibly my favourite book ever so if you're looking for a summer book you should definitely give it a try :)

Enjoy!

Dear Fred,

So I suppose I'm writing because Ginny made me. She says it will help. She says she wrote to you a few weeks ago and it helped her. I don't think anything will help though. I'm beyond help. She's locked me in our room though until I write it, so I suppose I'll just have to do it. I just don't really know how to start, I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't. And I want to mean everything I say to you here, you deserve that. I'll try my best, but I'll apologise now for the rambling I'll probably put in here, along with the multiple mistakes I'll likely make. It's not like the old days when the other students were willing to write our essays for us in exchange for a box of puking pastilles, or we could just use an auto-answer quill. I miss those days. It was all so simple back then.

I have a confession to make. Oh Merlin, I wasn't going to tell you about this, tell anyone about this. I could never keep anything from you though, and I need to tell you. I need to tell you so that you can forgive me. I don't deserve your forgiveness, but I'm going to ask for it anyway. Just, please, don't hate me? It was during the aftermath of, well, everything. There was a whole group of us cleaning up the castle, but I thought everyone had gone home. I'd stayed; I just couldn't face going back there, to our room. It's where you're still most alive, where I can hear your laugh as clearly as if you were right next to me. So I'd stayed, like a coward, to clean up the Gryffindor common room. I heard footsteps, and who should come through the portrait hole but Angelina. She just looked at me and burst into tears, and all I could do was hold her as she cried over you. That's when it happened. She kissed me. She kissed me. Angelina. The girl I was crazy about for years, not that I need to tell you that. You knew how I felt before I did. The girl who I loved - and the girl who always preferred you.

It was when I was kissing her, I had the most awful thought. A thought I deserve to be dead for. In fact worse than that, I don't deserve the relief of dying; I deserve to have to live with it for all eternity. I thought to myself, "She's only doing this because Fred's not here, because he's gone." Followed by a terrible, horrible, evil thought; "I'm glad he's gone."

I didn't mean it, I promise. It was stupid, a stupid passing thought, born of anger and hurt. Is it bad that I'm angry with you? Because I am. I'm angry that you don't have to be around for this, you don't have to deal with the family falling to pieces, with all the people who look at me like I'm carrying your body in my arms, with all the hurt and sadness that's engulfed the world. Please forgive me? I just don't know what to do. It's always been FredandGeorge. Not two people, just two halves of the same. Now I'm just George. What are you supposed to do when you lose half of yourself? I can't survive with just half of me here. That's what's confusing me; I'm still alive. I shouldn't have survived losing you, yet here I am, writing this. Proof that I'm still alive. I can have all the proof in the world, but I know one thing, and that's that I'm not still alive. I died along with you that night.

I daren't tell the others any of this though, Mum's worried enough about me as it is, and I don't think she's coping with losing you. She puts on a brave face, but we all know. She cries in the shower where she thinks we can't hear her, and all the food she cooks tastes like ashes. It's like the house is being suffocated by sorrow, we all just wander around all day, none of us knowing what to do to make things better, if it's even possible to make things better. It's so lonesome without you, all the laughter and light has gone. It's as if someone vanished the horizon while we were looking the other way. The end of the war meant we were supposed to have a better future, but what will my future look like? Who's going to be there to help me teach our future nieces and nephews the secret passageways? It's not like Percy would be able to help me, can you imagine his face if he found out all the things we got up to? I'd love to tell him sometime, just to see his face; he'd have such a fit. If only I could send you a picture… but I suppose that's not possible. It probably wouldn't be as funny anyway without you there to re-enact it with me anyway.

It wasn't too bad for a while, what with the casualties to get to St Mungo's, the repairs to be done, all the other jobs that needed doing. It kept my mind off things, and for a while I could forget that you weren't here. Then something would happen, just a little thing, and it would hit me like a ton of bricks because I wouldn't be able to tell you about it. Teddy smiled at me other day, and all I could think was that he'd never be able to smile at you. Don't worry though; I'm going to tell him all about you, all about us and everything we got up to. No one's going to forget you; I'll bloody make sure of it.

I'm scared though, of not forgetting. It's horrible, having a crushing feeling every time I remember you're dead because I've forgotten for a moment, but I'm dreading the day that I don't forget. That will be the day that I've accepted that you're dead, that there's a world without you, and it will be like it's okay. It will never be okay that you've gone, never. I can't accept that there's a world without you, that life has gone on. That's one thing that's amazed me since the battle; the world didn't stop with your heart. People still carried on, carried on fighting, and then carried on with their lives. I don't know how to carry on even if I wanted to. I don't though; I don't want to carry on without you there beside me. I know I'm going to have to though.

Godric, it's a good job you can't read this. You literally wouldn't be able to read it, even if you were alive to, it's that tear stained. Plus, it would definitely ruin my reputation if anything in this letter ever got out. This soppy stuff was a side of me I could only ever share with you, and even then it was usually only after a couple of firewhiskeys that we managed to flirt out of Madam Rosmerta. I'll have to thank Ginny though; I guess it kind of did help. I just really hope you can forgive me. Not just for the things I thought, but for surviving. Because I feel so guilty that I survived and you didn't. But I'll make it up to you, in fact, I'm going to promise you now, I'm going to live my life for the both of us, do everything we ever talked about. I won't give up, Fred.

Love, George

P.S. I miss you