Smiles were their specialty-his specialty now. Smiles were nothing new. They had grown up with them. Both of them. They ad just become more of a thing of habit; had become less surprising when they popped up.
They had been jokes, though. The watch-Ron-jump-five-feet-in-the-air-because-you-put-a-plastic-spider-somewhere-and-he-found-it-and-thought-it-was-real kind of smile. The kind of smile he expected, and knew, and had planned.
George liked to know when something would happen. He just did have problems, sometimes, with order and power when he wasn't able to do anything about it. He had inherited this trait within the limits of reason, and now it seemed to be kicking into gear more than ever.
He didn't know. He didn't plan it. He didn't foresee it.He hadn't even done a single thing about it. He couldn't have. He couldn't have and he didn't. That was bad. That was a problem, that was infuriating and saddening and it made him want to kill and die and vent something that was unknown to him but nevertheless was threatening to swallow him whole or possibly seep out through one of the many holes in his head.
He hadn't been in control, nobody really had, but it had happened. It had happened and he hadn't even been there. Like some stranger, like some alien, he had just wandered onto the scene and someone had to inform him of what had gone on.
Percy came up to him, tears streaming down his face. He pointed ot the corpse.
"The…the building…"
The finger movements had changed; now, a point at the remains of the ceiling, and then the index finger jerked downwards to the ground to convey the message he couldn't continue.
Blank and empty, George just stood.
Mr. Weasley began to sob harder, and approached him tentatively before throwing his arms around his son and refusing to let go for a good few minutes.
Still, George didn't even budge. He was still processing things through in his head—the world around him worked so slowly, and it felt like he was trying to wade through something awful, just thinking.
Once Percy had let George out of his grip he moved forward toward the line of bodies, immediately singling out the one he had had his eyes fixed on the entire time and approaching.
Vacantly, he just stared, and then sat himself absently down on a nearby rock—rubble, really, he realized. The remains of the parts of the castle that had fallen.
For a good, long time he stared down into those eyes, so like his own, and wondered. Wondered what it was he had said or thought that etched that smirking smile onto his features. It seemed so like him—like them—to go out like that. Funny, almost. It was the classic, the cliché, and yet it was real. It was all too real, and George squared his shoulders and gritted his teeth against the thought.
Without a thought as to what he was doing, he reached out a hand, awkwardly pressing a few grimy fingers to the shoulder of his other half. He wasn't expecting anything to happen. He knew it was real, he was just still wading in thought, and figured maybe something tactile might help.
George removed the trembling hand, brought it to his chin, and huffed a sigh. So that was it. That was how he snuffed it.
Surely, he thought, his twin must've had a grand exit—he was smiling, still. At least he had been happy, even if it hadn't been any of the grandeur that the pair of them had planned.
Yes, they had planned such things. The pair of them had had strange conversations, as was most likely expected of them. One in particular, having taken place in the back of the shop, about death.
It had started semi-serious, Fred approaching him from the back and firmly placing a hand on his shoulder, grim.
His twin sighed, relocated a mess of papers to the floor with an anticlimactic swipe of his forearm, and sat himself on a table.
"…Sometimes I wonder, you know? This is war."
Turned around and leaning on a while, George nodded.
"I wonder," Fred stated again. "…What's going to happen. Who's…who's going to be left."
A moment of silence proved enough time for George to take it in.
"I mean, reading the papers and such…people…they die all the time."
In slight disbelief, George watched his brother lower his head. The boy across from him, table-seated, was on the verge of tears—so far as he recalled, that hadn't happened in a long time.
"That could be Mum, George. That could be Dad or Ginny or Ron or any of us."
Us. The word brought another unpleasant word to mind, and as much as he hated to say it, George decided the time called for it.
"Us," he said. "It could be us."
Raising his head and wiping his eyes casually on the back of his hand, Fred chewed his bottom lip, as though pondering deeply. George feared another depressing statement, but instead, a slightly more Fred-like thing escaped his twin's lips.
"How do you think you'd wanna go?"
George raised a single ginger brow.
"Snuff it?" He clarified.
Fred nodded, as if this was not only the only possible answer, but also the most obvious thing to say. To George, however, it wasn't strange. Like an old surprise prank, he was used to it.
"Well," George began, straightening his posture and pacing around the room, hands clasped behind his back, "it wouldn't be painful, o'course."
"Of course," Fred parroted.
Melodramatically scratching his chin, he went on, "And I'd have to have time, y'know?"
Fred apparently did know.
"Enough time to like…to not really say goodbye, goodbyes are disgusting. Just to kind of…appreciate things more that I knew I wouldn't get to have them or see them anymore. Just…look at stuff, I guess. Talk to people. Tell them things I would probably only tell them if I knew I didn't have the time to wait until the perfect moment and whatnot."
Nodding again, his brother swung his legs up onto the table, carelessly kicked off another few stacks of papers, and rested his head on the palm of his hand.
Had he, George wondered, gotten his wish? Had Fred gone out with some witty remark, some kind of something that had made people remember him? Had he gotten the good exit he had wanted?
He was smiling, George saw, and nodded to himself to affirm it.
And that was when it hit him. He wasn't precisely sure what, but something about the emptiness in Fred's eyes helped him to the opposite end of the mental bog he had been wading through—helped him realize that would be the last smile his twin brother would ever spread across his freckled face.
Before he realized what he was doing, George had crumpled to his knees and begun dry-sobbing before any tears came. His other half was gone. How on God's green earth did anyone expect him to ever function normally again?
Throwing back his head so he could look at the crumbled building and the night sky and the many jets of light that threatened to bring so many others to the fate his brother had suffered, George raked a hand through his hair, and screamed without control.
"FUUUCK!" was the first thing he howled out into the chill of night. It started with that, and then he began to go off, cursing all of the things and all the people responsible.
"FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, HE'S DEAD AND IT'S ALL YOUR FUCKING FAULT!"
Maybe he was referring to himself. He hadn't even been there. He could've stuck with him, like Fred had when his ear… George stopped his inward ravings a moment to contradict himself. Fred had tried, of course, and would have been there—he had only been present for the after.
But this. This after was too late, and there were no more afters. This was the after to end all afters—to end all, simply.
"God damn it…" He said feebly, and out of the corner of his eye, saw his mother sit by him and half-felt her place an arm around his shoulders, her own shaking with outpours of grief.
And now there he was, the lone half. The one piece of a duo. The one person who probably wasn't whole enough to be one person anymore, let alone fill the shoes of two.
Standing up, George patted his mother on the shoulder and walked over to Ginny, kneeling beside her. As he had suspected, she was crying, streams of tears forming clean rivulets against her skin, grimy with the sweat and dirt and blood of battle.
"Hey," he said feebly, his voice cracking. Still, he was a little surprised at himself: his voice still worked at all. That was remarkable in itself.
She looked over at him and, without warning, enveloped him in a tight hug that he returned.
"It's not - fucking - fair!" She howled. George noticed for the first time that the pair of them were experiencing the only time in either of their lives they could swear in their mother's presence without so much as a quick slap and a reprimand.
George agreed in a single incline of his head, gently wiping tears from his sister's cheeks.
"He wanted you to be happy…" He said quietly, and after what seemed like centuries of silence, Ginny nodded too, and stood, and went off to battle.
It was that easy for her? It was that simple? George walked over to the pile of rubble where he had been sitting to see his mother, still sobbing, a mere shadowy figure retreating into the distance.
More tears made their presence known by splashing themselves down George's shirt front. He wished for somebody to tell him something reassuring; but maybe there was no such thing. He wanted somebody to come back for him, to come over to him, to tell him what Fred had wanted, because he was so sure he had misunderstood or not listened or never even known in the first place.
He had wanted them to be happy, he had told Ginny. Of course he had, but he had done that through jokes. There wasn't a bloody thing he could do now except for in fond memories.
George's sobbing heightened, steadied, and then slowed. Fond memories. Maybe, he thought…maybe he had paid more attention to his twin brother than he had thought minutes ago, because a thought came to him: what Fred had said he wanted.
"I'd want an exit. A good one."
George knew that much, but it was the rest of this speech that came to him as some comfort.
"A grand exit," his twin had told him, "that would make people think of me whenever they thought about me dying. I mean, tombstones and whatnot…that's depressing. I want something that would make people think more about my life and the good times and all that, not just focus on the fact that I've kicked the bucket. Ya know."
George wiped his eyes hurriedly, sighed, and decided that maybe he should be off to battle. Ginny and Mum had gone, and he couldn't find Dad, which meant he probably had, as well. Plenty of other people had lost friends and family as well, and, so far as he could see, he was alone, at the moment; the only one standing among the morbidly twisting line of bodies.
He was just heading out towards some branch when he turned back for a last look at his brother, still smiling.
Fred had wanted people to remember his life. Even in death, he was smiling—he looked so much more alive than any of those wearily dragging on across the grounds.
Inhaling deeply, George set off, wand raised high and face set and determined. It would be tough, but he would try as hard as he could to give Fred what he had wanted
I cryed when I found out Fred died. This popped in to my head I hopped you enjoyed it.