Twins.

The word echoed in Molly's mind, slipping and curling around her every waking thought like wisps of smoke. Twins in the Muggle world were celebrated or, at the very least, welcomed with a pleasant sort of exasperation. Still, no matter the happy reports Arthur could bring her of the Muggle world, they didn't relieve her of the stress and anxiety the reality of twins presented. Twins were rare in the pureblood sector of the wizarding world; marriage contracts over centuries had effectively removed families that were prone to twins from the gene pool, and that was because of the hazards and difficulties that nearly always accompanied twins.

Despite the wizarding world's use of magic, it remains a vast and unexplored frontier ruled by terms and conditions that wizarding society has never been able to pin down. It's a fluid energy, if it could be called an energy at all. In the case of a single birth, studies seem to indicate magic forming a stable loop between mother and child not unlike an umbilical cord. In the case of twins, however, the loop often destabilizes. If the twins are fraternal, they are often different enough to keep the loop stable. Identical twins—twins that magic itself seems to recognize as only one individual—cause an inescapable resonance to the magic. Instead of equally defusing between both twins before looping back to the mother, as is often the case with fraternal twins, the magic behaves unpredictably. As with many things involving magic, the unpredictable can often quickly become dangerous, creating something unnatural or strange. In most historic cases of identical twins—the cases that drove families prone to twins to blood-extinction—the overwhelming instability of that magic takes either the life or magic of one or both babes. In rare, though well documented cases thanks to the Unspeakable Department, the mother can also be harmed, stripped of magic or life herself. It was these reports that were filtered by blood purists and disseminated through the wizarding world that fed the harshest blood-purist ideology. New blood—Muggle blood—never had the careful screening of twin-prone bloodlines. Families including muggles or Muggleborns inherently had a higher risk of twins, and thus higher risks of Squibs born and higher mortality rates for mother and child alike.

The healers at St. Mungo's had wonderful words to describe the next usual step for a witch in Molly's circumstance. Magical traditions—customs developed over centuries to ensure a strong future—dictated that one babe be removed from the equation; one child would be culled to ensure the well being of the other and the mother.

Arthur and Molly retreated to the Burrow after hearing the news, claiming the need to think on their decision. Molly went home to be surrounded by her boys, all young and strong and growing six inches every second she turned her back. She stared at their faces, at their bright round eyes, and imagined burying one of those precious boys. The twins growing in her belly were not yet named, not yet given breath, but she could almost see them, lingering at the edge of her vision. Could she name a son, knowing she'd consigned a boy identical in looks and in innocence to lifelessness? Magical blood was sacred, wasn't it? Was it the magic that was sacred, or the life itself? Choosing one boy's life in favor of the other—it was sacrilege. Molly couldn't do it, not if she wished to still call herself a mother to her older boys.

So she and Arthur stayed home. Unlike her older boys, her twins were delivered at home, away from the prying eyes and the judgmental stares of those who believed she was needlessly risking her magic over mere sentiment. Her twin boys were smaller than her older sons had been at the time of their birth—they had to share space well before they were born, after all—but they made up for their small size through sheer attitude. From the moment they could crawl, the two would get into all sorts of trouble: tormenting the poor cat until the old girl finally ran away, levitating bites of food off of their brothers' forks moments before they took a bite, and burying the garden gnomes up to their necks in snow and dirt.

She named them Fred and George, loosely naming them after the two brothers she'd lost soon before the end of the war. Though they were not twins, Fabian and Gideon had been two parts of a greater whole in almost every sense of the world; they were each more powerful together than either was apart. As Fred and George grew, Molly saw her brothers reincarnated at times.

Sometimes she forgot the risks she had taken in keeping both of her beaming boys, and then she'd see something… unusual. She'd be darning a sock in the kitchen to feel a gentle tug on her dress; looking down, she'd see Fred who would be sobbing, telling her that George was hurt. But that was impossible—George was out in the back shed with his father while Fred was kept inside as punishment for some prank. A glance at the clock would tell her that George was indeed home, not in mortal peril, but then Arthur would come in with a screaming child with the tiniest of splinters in his hand.

She kept a close eye on her boys—as close as she could, anyway, as their family grew bigger and bigger. As they got older, the sense that the two boys spoke for the benefit of everyone else around them took root in Molly. Sometimes—but especially when they were alone—it seemed that they carried more meaning in the words that weren't said. Her twins were friendly and rambunctious with all their siblings, but they were often content to sit quietly together, content to stay entirely in their collective mind.

Mind magic. The thought whispered unwanted when the house finally quieted overnight. Molly was a homemaker, not a fool. She knew of the existence of all manner of mind magics, and all of them she could think of were dangerous, if not bordering on Dark. Some were geared towards defense, but most of those grey magics focused on destroying the sanctity of the human mind, ripping your way into someone's inner most thoughts and devouring what they wished most to keep safe. Legilimency was the great fear her mind conjured in those quiet nights. The fear wasn't that her boys would develop that power, but that some Dark wizard could come along at any moment. Tearing into any of her boys' minds was simply unacceptable, but the idea that someone could crack into both of her twins' minds simply by traveling along the ties that bound them—ties that her magic had formed when they were safe within her womb—made Mrs. Weasley balk.

It got easier, in some ways, as the boys got older. The bigger they were, the easier it became to fool people that their connection was shallower than it was, that it was all just part of an elaborate, years-long prank. It even got easier to fool herself, as she began to tell herself that magic had totally spared her boys anything that would make their lives unduly difficult. They were exceptional, she'd muse, but within the accepted, normal range of talents. The fear of those quiet nights dimmed as the nights became louder and the house fuller.

The twins continued to grow, and suddenly she wondered at how her special boys would fare in school. They'd go to Hogwarts, of course. There was never any question of that. She and Arthur had both been in Gryffindor; it was near guaranteed that all of her boys would be welcome in the house of lions once it was their turn to cross Black Lake. The house of the brave and the righteous—the house of the fools who look after they leap—was what her family, and the entire Weasley clan, expected of her boys. But as they grew, Molly began to think further on her twins. Fred and George were rather unlike their brothers, if Molly were honest with herself. They were excitable like the rest, but only towards others. If they were ever caught alone with each other, they were quiet, serious. They showed some aptitude for Gryffindor House, but they showed constraint in moments that Molly was forced to question if it was bravery they were displaying or a commendable ability to camouflage with the lions they lived with.

Ravenclaw wasn't it either. Fred and George weren't against studying or learning by any means, but their curiosity rarely carried them further than the knowledge required to successfully pull of their next great plot. They didn't seem overmuch interested in unravelling any particular clandestine secrets of the universe, and the perfectionism and educational fervor that overcame Ravenclaws just wasn't present in any of her boys, with the possible exception of Percy.

Hufflepuff wasn't quite right, which somewhat disappointed Molly as she thought further on it. Her boys were all devoted to family—a fact that she as a mother was unendingly pleased by—but that seemed to be more a learned behavior than a fact of either of her twins' personality. They were protective of their family, and hardworking whenever they could be persuaded to devote any sort of attention to a task, but that seemed to be it. Even then, their protectiveness oftentimes didn't feel like loyalty at all. To their siblings, they were close but not loyal. To each other… It was more as if they were of one mind, and how could one intentionally act to betray oneself? It wasn't loyalty that her twins felt for another, it was self.

So her mind reluctantly turned to the house of the snakes. The idea that any of her blood would be in Slytherin made Molly shiver, but she sternly rebuked herself. The war was over, so there was every chance that Slytherin was no longer a mere forwarding base and recruitment office for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his Death Eaters. The school had become little more than a precursor to battle in Molly's later years; that the entire house hadn't been purged of spies and sycophants by staff was still a curiosity to Molly.

But—she calmed her—she must think. If Slytherin was to be the house of her blood, she needed to research. She needed to expand her definitions and expectations of the house, so she went to work. From the moment the twins' Hogwarts letters flew through the window to the moment she waved the train goodbye, Molly dedicated every spare moment of her time to the history of Hogwarts' darkest house. By the end of the summer, she felt a small but growing sense of shame that the house of the cunning and the ambition had fallen so low. Her beautiful twin boys with their quick smiles and quiet focus were all that the house should have been: the culmination of every house with a fierce sense of direction to propel the school—to propel the whole wizarding world—further into the future.

The first letter home reached the Burrow the afternoon after the Sorting.

Mum—You'll be proud. We were sorted into Gryffindor, just like everyone else!

And Molly Weasley wept.

Published 4:20, 10.4.21

A/N:

Okay, okay, I know that Fred and George are not the only twins in the HP universe but hear me out:

The only CONFIRMED pureblood twins we see are Floria and Hestia Carrow. While there's an argument to be made for nature vs nurture, I'm happy to argue that something definitely went wrong with those sadists from the jump. The next twins we have an idea of blood status are the Patil twins. Canon only indicates that they are at least half-blood, so through the lens of this headcanon they either have a Muggle mother or just got lucky and were the exception. Every other set of magical twins we are aware of in the Potter-verse are similarly ambiguous regarding blood status OR they are fraternal twins, whose magic would be different enough to forgo the risk.

Thoughts?