It is all a blur once Harry returns.
They leave the Burrow – fraught urgency fuelling their every move - apparate to the grounds surrounding Hogwarts, sneak into the Hog's Head, take the secret passage from Arianna's portrait that leads straight to the Room of Requirements, now altered beyond recognition from how it was during their DA sessions, or from their own escapades as they sneaked in and read up a ton of charms books together – as much as they hated to read – to figure out things for their joke products, or simply hung out together and shared every thought to each other, unfiltered...
Hours pass in sheer, sick anticipation, Voldemort's icy voice echoing, demanding them to surrender.
None of them does though. None of them has planned on that. For this is the moment when they show that they aren't cowards who had retreated into hideouts, pinning all hopes on a teenager...
This is the moment when they fight their hearts out to win their freedom and their happiness back.
To some, it would return the happiness in its entirety.
To others, it would be returned in painful pieces, broken and damaged by the loss of their loved ones.
To some, though, the happiness wouldn't be returned at all. This war might just be serving to worsen everything rather than making things better. Some may say that it is all for the greater good, that the price they need to pay may be high, but what follows that, would be enduring.
But after the high price that they paid, what follows would be enduring indeed, though in a very twisted sense of the word, as they follow the ones who left them.
For without them, there simply isn't any meaning to the war that has been won, to the freedom that has been restored, to the happiness that has been regained.
Without them, its darkness.
They had been fighting it together, hands held tight, knuckles white, cold sweat dripping, hair sticking to their grimy faces, breaths shallow, hearts hammering...
Wands swiftly cutting through the air as they aimed countercurses at a pace that matched that of light, for what charged at them from a thousand different directions was light indeed – deathly green jets, swift and silent and cold, the wild, vicious shrieks of the ones who cast them strangely muted, as their entire being focused on the absolute imminence..
"Freddie. Are you scared?"
"I'll be a fool if I'm not,"
George holds Fred's limp hand, and brings it to his chest. Fred spreads his fingers and feels the steady beat under him.
Reassuring.
The kiss they share is brief. Chaste. They are high up on the astronomy tower, keeping watch, checking for any inconsistency in the shield charms that has been cast, and watching the vast grounds before them. There's the Forbidden Forest, dark, pitch black in the new moon night. The grounds are silent now. It's the calm before the storm.
Something told them that if they remained together, they would be protected.
They should have been together, fighting together, one hand gripping the wand, the other holding another's hand, anchoring them to safety, to familiarity.. to an inexplicable strength that love alone gave..
Intuition. Why are they eerily true?
The intuition that they have concerning each other...
It is something that is incomprehensible.
It comes from within the depths of the bond.
And if no other intuition, this one, this one is always eerily true.
They had to separate.
Fred gave a cry of alarm, and ran, ripping his hand away from his twin's, for there was their older brother Percy, busy fighting off a Death Eater as another aimed death at him from behind...
And George would've been dead had he taken his eyes off the wand pointed at him.
Seconds and mere metres of separation turned into minutes and an unreachable distance.
George would've lost his life had he lost his focus for even a fraction of a second. And he dared not to lose his life. He dared not to leave Fred behind.
He wouldn't dare, not until he knew that he wasn't there to be left behind.
Not until he knew that he was, in fact, the one left behind. Not until that.
And now, as he fights off yet another Death Eater, he feels it.
It's so sharp, so agonizing, that he has the wind knocked out of him. He manages to disarm the Death Eater, before he gives in to the pain that has capsized him. He sinks to the ground, tries to breathe...
What makes him scramble up, heart kicking into an overdrive, is a fire that is brought on by a single, searing thought –
Fred.
It's a clang of dissonant drum rolls and a thousand jarring strings and an incomprehensible, static scream in his head as he runs, runs as if his life depends on it.
It guides him, that something that ties him to that person, that inexplicable something...
That something that has kept them tied from the moment of their creation.
That bond.
This pain. He knows what it is. He doesn't realize that he crying as he runs, as he thinks that he knows what this pain is...
Terror so pure, so complete, has seized him, and he has no eyes, no mind for the curses that fly at him, miss him by a hair's breadth...
"Fred! FRED!"
He screams murder as he shoves away the shapeless figures that surround the scene. The figures yell something at him, something about keeping calm, something about being sorry, something about there being a war to fight...
He wants to kill them all, but he doesn't even register the sheer anger as he focuses on doing what is far more important than anything.
Hogwarts shields have long been breached. Protected by nothing as it got ravaged mercilessly by the war.
George hugs Fred's limp body to himself, closes his streaming eyes...
And apparates away from the hell.
It has not ended here :) A chp or two to go.