"What're you doing, Dad?" Fred asked when he saw his father sitting on the floor of the living room, surrounded by pictures and papers.
"Come here," he responded enthusiastically.
Fred had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on anything. "What is all this?"
"A few months from now it'll be twenty-five years since the shop opened- there'll be a big celebration. We thought it might be nice to have some pictures of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes through the years. Even some early recipes," he said, gesturing to a pile of parchment next to Fred's foot.
"I thought I wasn't allowed to see the sacred recipes until I took over for you," he laughed, looking at the handwritten lists with crossing outs and margin notes.
"Try making those up, you'll get what's coming to you. Terrible side effects in those stages."
Fred sat next to his father, putting the recipes down and picking up some pictures. They were full of his aunts and uncles smiling brilliantly and waving enthusiastically. Birthdays, weddings, Christmases. The pile he was holding looked like it was from his father's mid-twenties. He saw himself, as a baby, appear towards the bottom of the stack, but there were none of Roxy yet. They were the easiest two to pick out among their cousins, with their skin. Many different people were holding him in these photos, but it was always clear it was him. Aunt Fleur playing with him while he sat on the table in front of her. Uncle Harry holding him and laughing as Uncle Ron tried to feed him, with little success. His parents on the couch in the Burrow, holding him on both of their laps and grinning happily.
"Your mother loves that picture. Always meant to have it framed," his father mused, looking over his shoulder. "Can I see those?"
Fred passed him the pictures and picked up the ones that his father had been looking at before. The same cast of characters, for the most part, but younger. Closer to the store's original opening, probably. But something was different.
It was the smiles. They were there, and genuine, but always closed-mouth, tight. "When is this?" he asked.
George glanced back. "Harry's seventeenth birthday, I think."
Right. It was during the war.
He shuffled through some more, and found one of the store's original staff. It was always strange for him, to see his namesake next to his father. Like seeing double. "How did people tell you apart?" he breathed, before realizing that was probably rude. He was never sure how to ask his dad about Uncle Fred. But George laughed.
"They couldn't, mostly. You can bet we had fun with that."
Since he didn't seem upset by it, Fred decided to ask the question he'd always wondered the most. "Is it weird? That I don't look anything like him but I have his name?"
"You do."
"I do what?"
"Look like him. To me, anyway. You have the same smile." He said this all very casually, without looking up from the pictures in his hands.
"Yeah?" he asked, looking at the picture again to compare, but he didn't even know which twin he should look at.
"Yeah." He looked up now, and touched his son's shoulder. "He would've loved you, Freddie."
And that made Fred smile, and that made George smile back, and they both went back to looking through the memories on the floor, happy to see a glimmer of the past in the unchangeable present.
