Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
A/N: Well, look who's back! It's been a long time, hasn't it? The good news: I'm working on an absolutely huge project in the HP-verse which I'm really excited to share with you all. The bad news: it's not going to be ready for a long, long time. In the meantime, please enjoy this deeply depressing one-shot about my favourite siblings. I don't really know what possessed me to write this, but I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Deathbeds
vii.
The first time is the worst; of course it is, this is it, this is the moment that will forever divide his life into before and after. Nothing will be the same again.
George kneels on the cold stone floor beside Fred's still face, and he realises hearts don't break with a violent SNAP, all tears and hysterics: they just dissolve, leaving emptiness behind.
His mother is sobbing. Bill, Percy, his father, even little firecracker Ginny who never sheds a tear, they're all weeping. George doesn't cry. He doesn't speak. He just kneels there, still, quiet, and watches his world shatter.
How long has he been here now? Half an hour, maybe, or maybe only a few seconds, or maybe a century. There's sixteen minutes between them – is he older than Fred ever will be yet?
There's no gentle murmurs this time around, no wish to ease a loved one's passing. Death is swift and sudden and doesn't give you second chances. Instead of sitting by a bed he's kneeling by a corpse, because this is no sickroom. This is a morgue.
There's no pain yet. That will come later, in the days and months and years to follow: a lifetime of it, stretching out endlessly before him, and in that first moment when he sees it his heart quails and he thinks he cannot walk the path before him, no one can expect him to. The determination to walk it will come later, as will the desperate attempts to escape it. Right now he's just numb.
"Fred," he said, seeing the unthinkable. Very quietly, "Fred, no." Then, "Fred, please," and then he sank to his knees and hasn't spoken since, because he knows there's only one reason why Fred won't answer. Can't answer.
He reaches out to close bright brown eyes for the last time, and his hand doesn't tremble. The cool smoothness of Fred's pale skin doesn't make him nauseous. There's just nothing.
The battle is going badly. Earlier he despaired of this, but now he's nearly glad. Let the end come, bloody and brutal, let the Death Eaters come down and butcher every single one of them. And hope they'll do it quickly, before his fragile barrier breaks and grief comes pouring down on him in a great suffocating wave.
He's twenty years old and his life. Is. Over.
vi.
The second time, well, he's no stranger to grieving and he thinks he might even be prepared for the rush of pain that's coming, but that doesn't make it easier. Charlie's fifty-five, which is better than twenty but still no age to be dying. He always burned bright, didn't he?
He burned, anyway, a raging inferno of flesh and protective clothes that weren't any protection at all.
The reserve put the Horntail down. They had to do it, they said: it was a danger to humans. George thinks this is almost the worst part. Charlie lived for his dragons – he'd never want to know he'd cost one its life. But he won't know, because he isn't going to wake up again.
George has spent a long time cursing death for being quick and unexpected, and moving far too fast, but now he realises it isn't any better this way, because Charlie's in pain, his face an unrecognisable collapsed mess of red, his arms blackened, his legs so far gone they were amputated as soon as he arrived in hospital. He's in pain and there's nothing they can do but watch him fade agonisingly away.
Their parents left, a little while ago, too worn down to stay any longer. He thinks this will surely kill them, two sons lost. But Charlie's brothers and sister stay with him. The Weasley siblings have been no strangers to vigils, over the years: that awful night Ginny was taken into the Chamber, or when Dad was attacked by that snake; sitting up all night by Fred's body before the funeral because George couldn't leave Fred and the rest of them couldn't leave George; those forty-eight hours when Fleur laboured endlessly with little Louis, mother and child drawing perilously near the brink before coming back again, and one of them was always at Bill's side, but Charlie most often.
Bill's crying now, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. As he got into his fifties and his grey hairs started to become more prominent he ditched the ponytail, but he's still got the earring and he's never once looked old to George until this moment. Bill played his part in saving him, once, when all George wanted was to end the pain, and so he resolves to return the favour. He knows what it's like to lose your best friend.
The rest of them are quiet: Ginny kneeling by the bed with her head on the covers near Charlie's ruined elbow, her red mane spread out around her like she's still sixteen years old; Ron and Percy at the foot of the bed, blue eyes fixed on the floor. George leans against the wall of the little isolation room and waits.
As afternoon turns to evening Charlie's breathing becomes harsher and more laboured: a death rattle. Death has a cool, sour smell that makes the back of George's throat feel slimy and dirty. He's compelled to draw closer, though, and now they are all stirring to attention, raising their heads and reaching out before jerking their hands back again. They're all desperate to touch him one last time, but they can't bear to hurt him any more.
Maybe it's wrong and evil, but George finds himself praying that it will end. Charlie isn't conscious. It will be better for him once the pain has stopped. This is what he tells himself, but hot tears still slide out when the horrible sound is at last replaced by silence.
Ginny slips a small, warm hand into his and he squeezes it hard, feels her doing the same. Across the bed Percy slips an arm around Bill's shoulders as Ron makes a guttural sound and jerks to his feet to stumble over to the window.
Shaking a little, George draws the crisp white sheet over his brother's face, but he can still see the poor withered silhouette with stumps where the legs should be and the collapsed hollow in place of a nose.
The first time was the worst, but this isn't any easier.
v.
Thirty-two years later, and this is okay. This is okay. Bill's lived a long, full life. His children have grey hairs and Victoire even has a tiny granddaughter of her own tucked under one arm.
(This isn't okay.)
They've said their goodbyes, and they're waiting in the garden while Fleur and Bill's children sit by his bedside. Of course that's only natural, and George wants his own family suddenly more that he can say: wants to drink in the scent of Angelina's hair and see Freddie's sparkling grin and feel Roxie's arms flung hard around him; but he wonders when it became like this, when they stopped being the Weasley siblings and became some disparate group instead.
Merlin, he misses Fred.
Mum and Dad went not long after Charlie did, and in the intervening years George has had time to think about what makes a good death. Fred was twenty years old and he missed out on so much, but for all that he's glad his twin went the way he did, laughing to the end, rather than crippled with pain like Charlie or blighted by too much grief like his parents. He would not have it that way again, if he can.
So he kneels in the garden of Shell Cottage, taking in the clean sea breeze as he rummages through the boxes he's brought out with him. The full moon (fitting, that – it's seen his brother through so much suffering) gleams off the water and he remembers what Bill said to him back in ninety-nine, in the desperate months when he thought there was nothing worth living for: This has always been a place of healing.
But not for you, Bill, he thinks now. You aren't healing.
"What are you doing?" Percy asks dully from where he's leaning against the white picket fence.
George sits back on his heels and looks up. Ron and Ginny are watching them too, now: Ron paused in his restless pacing, Ginny's little white face lifted from where she was staring at the flowers.
"Look," he says, and his siblings all crowd around him, three left where once there were six.
They're all too weary to laugh, but even so their eyes brighten and Ron's lips twitch upwards in a faint imitation of a smile. "Are those—?"
George nods, and without further ado begins to set the fireworks off: Weasleys' Wildfire Whizz-Bangs, still one of the shop's most lucrative products. Fred did most of the legwork on these, back when they were seventeen and the whole world was theirs for the taking, and George hasn't found a better recipe in the intervening decades. It's fitting, somehow, that it's Fred who helps to give Bill his final send-off.
They sit back in the grass with their arms around each other and watch the show, dragons and serpents and who-knows-what raining down upon the black sea beyond the clifftops, and maybe, maybe, this is okay. In the house Bill's grandchildren are choking back laughs, even.
Percy's arm is around him and his own is on Ron's shoulder and Ginny grips his hand tight. There's no-one else to hold on to.
"'E saw them," Fleur assures them later, tear-splotched. "'E smiled."
And that's really all that matters, isn't it?
iv.
Molly and Lucy come out of the bedroom with their arms around each other, tears raining down both their faces. For a moment George feels a sickening swoop in the pit of his stomach – it's done, it's over, he's gone – but then Lucy chokes out, "He's asking for you."
Molly turns to shoot them a slightly accusatory glance, as if she doesn't understand why her father would want his siblings with him at the end instead of his daughters, and George doesn't know how to explain. Maybe he doesn't even fully understand it himself. At any rate, he doesn't want to hurt his niece any more than she is, so he just follows Ron and Ginny through the door.
Percy's fallen asleep again, in the few minutes it took his daughters to leave. He stays awake for shorter and shorter periods each time now, and he's rarely lucid when he does wake. He's said his goodbyes already, and now they're just waiting. There are worse ways to go, all things considered.
Percy's always been rail-thin and tall, but now he looks skeletal: wrapped up in a pile of blankets though the summer day is warm, his hair a shock of white against an equally pale pillowcase, horn-rimmed glasses folded up beside a half-finished book and a framed picture of Audrey on the bedside table. He'll never wear them again.
And oh, it's selfish, because Percy's had a good life, and now he's having as close to a good death as there is, but George doesn't care, he wants more, he wants longer, he doesn't want to be the oldest one. Just a few more years, he finds himself begging. Just a few more minutes.
Then, miraculously, blue eyes open. They're vague and bleary, and they take a while to focus. They do, eventually, on George where he's sitting on the side of the bed. Percy moistens his cracked lips and then murmurs, "Fred?"
George closes his eyes for the briefest of moments. Dad did this too, and he knows what he needs to say. That doesn't make it easier, that people can still mistake his wrinkled face and white-streaked hair for his twin's, a constant reminder that Fred never got any of this, never got to grow old with a wife he loved and hold his children and then his grandchildren and laugh and love and live. And yes, he never wasted a moment of those twenty brilliant years, but that doesn't mean he had enough time.
But it's Percy who's dying now, not Fred, and Percy whom he needs to comfort. "Hey, Perce," he says brightly, and his voice is roughened with age but his brother doesn't notice. "Nearly there now. You're doing so well."
Lying is a kindness sometimes.
Percy draws in a rattling breath. "My... fault," he murmurs. "I'm... sorry. For...give... me?"
"No," George says firmly, but it isn't him speaking at all, it is Fred, Fred's voice and Fred's thoughts too. "It wasn't your fault, Percy, and there's nothing to forgive. You made me laugh. Thank you for that."
Ginny is sobbing silently into Ron's shoulder, but George doesn't cry. He looks at his brother and Percy looks back at him with eyes suddenly wide with wonder, and then he smiles and his hand, which has been grasping George's wrist, goes slack.
His last two siblings huddle closer to him and he wraps his arms around them, and they mourn together on the foot of the narrow bed.
iii.
Ron doesn't make it to a hundred.
He isn't far off; he was still walking steady when George's own hundredth birthday came last April, but by the time the new year rolls around he's bedridden, and on a blustery January day Hermione tells them the end is coming.
This is not like the other times: this is grief so raw and painful he almost forgets how to breathe, a ripping violation of the kind he hasn't felt for eighty years, because Ron is younger than him, Ron is his little brother, and it should be him instead. He would give anything for it to be him instead.
At first there's a whole crowd in the sickroom: Hermione and Rose and Hugo as well as George and Ginny. Then Hugo, listening to the death rattle that has become so familiar to George over the decades, shakes his head and leaves, and Rose goes after him because siblings need to stay together at times like this.
Hermione stays a while longer, but then she plants a long, lingering kiss on Ron's lips and gets up. Her face is pale and her eyes sparkle with tears, but she smiles at them as she moves for the door. "He was yours first," she whispers, and Ginny stops to hug her tight before letting her go. George spares a moment to wonder how she can possibly understand so well, when she never had any brothers or sisters – but then, she and Ron were both there until the end when Harry went last year, so maybe she does know, after all.
Ron sleeps fitfully, mumbling names from here and now and long ago: "Mum," and "Hermione," and "Rosie," and "Bill," and "Harry," and "Fred". Maybe the lines between past and present aren't so clear-cut in that twilit world at the end of life. Maybe that's why the dying always seem to want their siblings near, the only constants you know from birth to death.
Ginny takes Ron's hand and twines her fingers through his and then lays her head on his chest, as if she can switch places with him if only she is close enough. "No matter how long you get," she says drearily, "it's never long enough."
"Isn't it?" George asks. It's been eighty years since he was suicidal and he's never once regretted that he failed, never begrudged himself the life he's led, not since he promised himself to live for both of them. Ron told him to do that. But now, suddenly, he thinks of the other side of the picture, of eighty years without an ever-growing burden of grief, and he is tempted for a moment.
A life without Fred – that was possible, much as he doubted it at the time. And it will be possible, too, to go on in a world without Ron. But looking at his loyal, loving, faithful little brother, the child he used to tease and the man who helped him put his life back together, he is not sure that he wants to.
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment he goes, at least from where George is sitting. The harsh breaths are growing gradually quieter and fainter, the thin hand he clutches is growing gradually colder. But Ginny has her head on her brother's chest, with her mane of snow-white hair that is still long and thick spread out on the blankets, and by looking at her face George knows.
He reaches out with his free hand to take hers, feeling the unnerving contrast between cold slack fingers and hot ones that grip his hard enough to bruise, and holds both siblings – the living and the dead – tight.
ii.
They're racing each other to the finish line, almost sighing in relief each time they need to rush to St. Mungo's for a checkup, struck with panic each time the other one does. Luckily Angelina is still healthy and strong, and George lies beside her each morning when he wakes up and thanks Merlin that he will be spared this blow at least. And he would never want her to suffer, and maybe he's selfish but hasn't he grieved enough?
One day, though, Albus Floos to tell him Ginny's fallen down the stairs and it's not looking good, and he knows that 'long enough' has come for her after all.
She isn't in any pain when he reaches the hospital. She's still lucid, sitting up in her bed and talking crisply to her children. Her bright brown eyes look so much like their mother's.
The kids, who are all in their late seventies and not actually kids at all, are crying, but Ginny is firm. "I don't want you to see me like that," she says. "Please – give me this. Please, Jamie."
Of course it's Lily who capitulates first. She's always had a particular bond with her mother, and now she gulps back a sob, whispers, "We love you, Mum," and kisses Ginny's cheek. Ginny draws her girl into a surprisingly strong hug and then does the same to her sons. They file out of the room past George, Albus lifting his startlingly bright green eyes to his uncle as he does so.
"What's this, then?" George asks. He's surprised by how even his voice is as he sits down beside her.
She gives him a look, like he's seven again and teasing Ronnie too much, or eighteen and switching all her Holyhead Harpies posters to Puddlemere ones and asking her how many boys she's got on the go right now, or twenty-one and despairing of ever being happy again, or thirty-five and corrupting her eldest son in the joke shop, or sixty-two and stealing the cake for her fortieth wedding anniversary (though he baked her another one, complete with a Canary Cream in the middle – the feathers were very fetching with her fancy blue dress). It's a don't give me that rubbish, George look, and thinking that this is the last time he'll ever see it breaks his heart, if there's anything left of it to break by now.
"It's time," she says, and though he wants to rail against the unfairness of it all he nods because that's what she deserves.
"I need you to do something for me," Ginny murmurs, and then he sees the tube dripping golden liquid into her wrist, and he realises why she seems so strong when by rights she should be fading fast, and what she wants him to do.
He hesitates for only a moment. "Now?"
"I can't spend the rest of my life chained to a bed, George," his sister whispers. "Even with this stuff they only give me a day or so. I don't want the kids to see that. Please." A small warm hand clutches at him for the very last time.
He nods, casting an eye over the vessel of golden potion forcing imperfect life into her veins from the bedside table. "How long will you have without it?"
"A few minutes."
George takes a breath, as deep as his weakening lungs will allow, and then raises his wand as he says, "Evanesco." Potion, bottle and tube all disappear.
"Thank you," Ginny whispers, leaning forward, and he holds her as she rests her head on his shoulder for the very last time.
He cries, this time.
They don't need to say much, not when there's a lifetime of perfect understanding between them, but after some minutes in silence Ginny lifts her head – it's a struggle now – and mumbles, "You were always my favourite, you know."
George smiles. "'Course I was," he says against her white hair. "I was always the handsomest."
She actually laughs. "Alright, Lugless." She pulls back a little so she can look him in the eye. "I love you."
"And I love you, little sis," he says, squeezing her tight. She leans back against him and goes still and quiet. There's no such thing as a good death, but this is as close as it gets.
George lowers her body – so tiny and light in death – down onto the bed, and kisses her forehead for the very last time. He can't stay long. James, Albus and Lily are waiting for him outside.
He looks around the room, and then walks out alone.
i.
His turn comes a little under a year later. And yes, it's a hard year in some ways. Hard to think that he is the only one left who remembers Christmases at home before they went to school, playing Quidditch in the backyard with apples for Quaffles and coming in muddy and glowing at suppertime, banging on the ceiling of the attic to get the ghoul to shut up and traipsing down the road to the Muggle primary school in the village, all those summer evenings when Mum was cooking and Dad was working late and it was just they seven, laughing and talking and teasing each other. Maybe memories are only precious when you have someone to share them with.
He will be leaving people to mourn him. The kids and their kids visit all the time, full of chatter and always ready to help around the house. Fred tells him that his daughter Annie is just about ready to take over the shop herself, with eager assistance from James's children, and she's pregnant again and isn't it amazing? George thinks of the empty, run-down building they bought nearly a century ago, and smiles. Yes, he is leaving a legacy.
Meanwhile Roxie has all the news about England's utterly pitiful attempts to rally back after their last World Cup disaster, and those Beaters are a national disgrace and back in the day she could have done better with both her hands bound behind her back and her bat held between her teeth. George agrees with her wholeheartedly, and Angelina rolls her eyes.
Angelina, his blessing, his saviour, his light in the gathering darkness. Sometimes she kisses him and it's been more than eighty years but he still marvels at the gift of her love and thinks maybe his 'long enough' isn't here yet. Maybe no-one ever gets long enough.
But then a strange thing starts to happen. He'll be in the kitchen or out in the garden or sitting by the fireplace of an evening, and though he's by himself he doesn't feel alone at all. They are not present, as such, and they're definitely not ghosts. But they're here all the same, all six of them, drinking tea or dozing off on the couch, and it's almost like they're alive again because that's the way he remembers them. As if they all got the chance to grow old because that's how he imagines it sometimes: a different world where Bill got to see that granddaughter of Victoire's – brilliant, sneaky little Apolline – head off to Hogwarts and shock them all when she ended up in Slytherin; a world where Charlie retired but it was still impossible for him to forget about his dragons and the MacFusties on their reserve up in Scotland were always panicking and calling him for advice on the hatchlings. A world where Fred had children just the same age as George's and they were closer than cousins and he watched them grow up and start families and inherit the shop together, and now he comes over every day and they never run out of things to say to each other for all that they've shared so much of their lives, and he still smells just the same as he did when he was twenty and sometimes he leans against George's shoulder or wraps an arm around him in that particular careless way of his or looks up at him with brown eyes that still sparkle after all this time.
He sees it so clearly sometimes.
George slips back into a very old habit, of saying we instead of I, and leaving his sentences half-finished on occasion. Long ago, the effect of this could be grotesque, but now it feels natural. Angelina gives him concerned looks at first, but she doesn't question him; George doesn't know how he'd explain that he feels closer to Fred these days than he's been since 'ninety-eight. The gap between them is closing now, narrowing to nothing. This is what it meant to live for both of them.
Well, now he is living for all of them, six phantom hearts beating alongside his, stretching out just another day because at least one of them has to see the first match the Cannons win in two centuries, right? At least one of them has to be there to watch little Lucy become Deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts. At least one of them has to make the weekly pilgrimage to a little cemetery that's expanded over the last century, Fred's lonely grave joined by many others now. In a way he yearns to let go, but wouldn't it be selfish when 'long enough' never came for so many?
There is a weight of responsibility to being the last one left that he never could have imagined.
At last, though, he is confined to his bed, and Angelina sits beside him constantly as his children hug him goodbye, and he watches the sun rise and set and rise and set for a few days. Then he slips into a dream state where sometimes he can see them, all crowded round his bed just as he did for each of them, and Ginny is smiling but then he blinks and it's not Ginny at all, it's Lily. Or a freckled hand squeezes his and he thinks of Ron but it's Freddie's voice he hears. He sees his twin, too, still with the brightest smile he's ever come across, and he looks simultaneously twenty and a hundred, but he keeps fading away again.
"Stay with me," George begs.
"Of course I will, love," Angelina says soothingly.
At the end they are all there: Angelina holding tight to his hand and his children kneeling on the bed with their shoes still on, and assorted nieces and nephews and grandchildren crowded in near the door. George can't speak, now, but he tries to smile for them. He thinks he would like to die smiling.
Of course they are there too: Ginny, Ron, Percy, Bill, Charlie, Fred. They all stand near the bed just as they have so many times before, and George realises he isn't alone.
He never was alone.