This monstrosity of a chapter is for Maggie, who has waited so long, so almost patiently, for me to finish Fred's story.
Fred
Fred figured out pretty early on that he didn't come from the most traditional of families. He could remember his parents' wedding, for one thing, and he knew for a fact most kids couldn't say that. But he could remember the day his parents got married, and not vaguely, either. He'd been five.
And it wasn't like his friend Simon, whose real parents had gotten divorced and then his mother married someone else. No, in Fred's case it was his parents, his actual parents, and they'd all been a family since Fred was born. They just didn't get married until he was five.
He knew it was unusual, but he never really cared. It hadn't mattered to him. In fact, it had never even been anything he thought about until he was six and he'd overheard a conversation between his grandparents when he was staying at their house the way he did every year when March turned to April.
"Molly, you know how hard this time of year is for them," Grandda had said.
"It's hard for all of us, Arthur," had been Gran's reply.
"Yes," Grandda's tone had been patient but firm, "but especially for them. We have to let them work it through in their own way and their own time."
"I just worry about them," his Gran had said, so quietly Fred almost hadn't heard it. "Sometimes I think Freddie's the only thing holding the two of them together. A blessed little accident, that child."
He hadn't known what to make of that, because how could a little kid be an accident? He caused accidents, sure, plenty of them (even more when James was around). Every once in a while he had accidents. But being an accident? That didn't make sense.
He'd already known that in most families, the mum and dad got married before they had kids. But he hadn't realized that most families celebrated the parents' birthdays as much as the kid's. His birthday was the only one celebrated in his house. He thought he knew when Mama's birthday was, and he was pretty sure Dad's was the week he always spent with Gran and Grandda Weasley, but there had never been cake or a party, and if gifts were given, he'd never been told.
He also noticed that there usually wasn't a lot of time between brothers and sisters - three or four years at most. But he was seven and a quarter when his little sister Roxanne was born, and that was older than anybody else in his family had been when they'd had little siblings. James had had two by the time they were four!
But maybe the biggest difference - and the one that came closest to making him jealous of all those other kids - was that most families didn't seem to have Angry Months.
Fred hated the spring. And he hated the end of winter, too, because December was an Angry Month, and so was April and so was May, which meant that January and February and March were Angry Months, too, months when his parents got dark and folded and there was lots of shouting and fighting on his parents' end and lots of hiding and covering his ears on Fred's. The week he spent at Gran and Grandda's was like an oasis, a chance for the fearful knot inside him to untie itself a little. But it didn't ever really go away because Fred knew that staying at the Burrow meant the worst was coming, because April was the angriest Angry Month of all.
It wasn't as bad as it sounded when he thought it like that; Fred knew that. Because not all of December was Angry, and neither was all of May, and January and February weren't nearly as bad as March and April, and the rest of the year was fine and unshadowed and almost normal.
But Fred hated the Angry Months, and he didn't understand why his family had them when no one else did, but he didn't know how to tell anyone about them, because what if no one else knew that Angry Months were a thing? If they were only a part of his family, how would anyone else know what he was talking about?
When he was little, he spent the Angry Months hiding from his parents, avoiding them, trying not to make them angrier. He did everything he could to put happy things in the house - pictures, notes, flowers if any were growing - and sometimes it worked. Sometimes, he caught his parents on a good day and made them smile and the Angry Months almost weren't for a moment.
But sometimes, lots of times, there wasn't anything he could do about the yelling. And on those days, he hid under his bed, his hands pressed against his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, and he waited for it to end, worrying all the time that if he was the accident that had made them a family, maybe he was the only reason they still were. Maybe if he hadn't been there, his parents would have gone away from each other and maybe found a way to be not so angry. Maybe, he thought when the yelling was loudest and his thoughts were the darkest, maybe his parents knew that too, and that's why they were so angry - because they knew they wouldn't be if he wasn't there making them be a family.
He was eight when the Angry Months started to infect him, too, when he first felt a spark of his own anger rather than just worry and anxiety and fear. He had started trying to make a list of the things his parents argued about during the Angry Months, because he thought that maybe he could make some of them go away. So he started washing the dishes and cleaning his room and dusting the furniture (as well as an eight-year-old could) and giving his dad fifteen minute reminders before dinner so he could wrap up what he was doing in the shop. He did it all, preventing messes instead of making them for the first time in his life, and it hadn't made any difference. If the dishes were clean, his parents argued about the undone laundry. If his father made it up to dinner on time, his mother shouted at him for coming home smelling like sulfur or soot or gunpowder, and it was all so stupid!
It's like they're looking for things to fight about, he thought angrily one night as he listened to his parents shouting over why Roxie hadn't been fed on time, and with that thought came Fred's first spark of anger - anger at his parents, anger at their fighting, anger at the fact that their yelling was now making Roxie feel as scared and upset as he used to.
It's not fair! he shouted inside his head, and he resolved to do something about it, once and for all.
He'd only wanted to get their attention. He hadn't meant to send a curio cabinet in their living room crashing to the floor. But he had. And the silence in the room after the crash had been deafening – for a moment. Then his parents had started yelling at him.
How could he be so careless, what was he thinking, was he trying to get himself grounded, they let him get away with quite a lot but senseless destruction was not acceptable, it went on and on, and Fred just stood there, speechless because it was not how he'd envisioned the moment going.
And at first he thought to be even angrier, because it had been an accident, and couldn't they tell accidents from the things he did on purpose? But then, he realized something, something incredibly important.
They weren't yelling at each other.
They were still yelling, they were still angry, but at him, and more than that, they were yelling together at him, and they weren't yelling at each other. So he set his jaw stubbornly and acted like he'd meant to do it and let them yell themselves hoarse and send him to his room.
Door slammed shut, he held his breath and waiting for the fighting to resume — but it didn't. Silence fell over the house, and he released that breath into the silence, exhausted from the tension, a plan already half-formed in his head. He couldn't say he liked the plan very much. He couldn't say it wasn't, on some level, a really dumb idea. But if it worked, if it would keep his parents from spending so much of their time yelling at each other, then it would be worth it. He had to believe that. Because it was all he had.
The plan became his Secret Weapon. He pulled it out whenever the shouting became too much. Whenever he felt so tense he thought his arms might shatter. Whenever he saw Roxie take to hiding under her bed. Whenever his own anger started to boil over inside of him. Then he'd unleash the Secret Weapon, destroy something, cause some massive piece of trouble, push just the right button to set his parents off on him.
He hated being yelled at and punished and having to keep quit when his parent demanded to know why he was acting like this, but he grit his teeth together and repeated over and over and over, It's better this way. It's better this way. It's better this way.
He made it two Angry Month cycles without being found out. It had been in his favor that the Angry Months usually ended before summer got started full swing, so the punishments he had to endure very rarely affected his time with James and Molly. It had been in his favor that the Angry Months ended before he and Molly and James could make their own mischief.
He and Molly and James had big plans for the summer Fred would turn ten. They'd all be in double digits, and that meant they'd be big kids, finally. They had every minute of every day from May til August planned out, and the start of the summer was a huge camp-out they'd finally managed to convince their parents to let them do alone (or mostly alone. They wouldn't be going too far from the Burrow, and they'd still be within range of supervision, but those were just details).
Fred knew how important the camp-out was to James and Molly; heck, it was important to him, too, and he'd promised himself that he'd be on his best behavior in May, no matter how bad things got at home, because he knew it would be the first thing his Mum and Dad took away.
But it had been bad. One of the worst arguments he could ever remember his parents getting into. He'd tried everything he could think of to drown it out, but nothing worked, and Roxie had been crying, she was so scared, and she was two, and she shouldn't have to deal with that, and what could he say to make it better? She could barely string a sentence together, but she begged him to make it stop. What was he supposed to do?
He flooded his dad's workshop. He stuffed the sink full of play-doh and turned the taps on full force and watched as the water gushed over the edge, spilling onto the floor. And then he pushed half-finished projects into the mess, scattered notes and journals into the water, destroying them, crying tears he couldn't help because he knew he was kissing his perfect summer goodbye.
He'd never been yelled at the way he was yelled at that night. It wasn't just the camp-out they took away; it was everything. He was under lock and key from that moment until the end of the summer, and the worst part of the punishment was when they made him tell James and Molly why he wouldn't be joining them. James looked hurt and confused and Molly looked murderous, and Fred hated the Angry Months more in that moment than he ever had before.
Fred was put into a room by himself after that, but there was only so much that could be done to keep Molly Weasley out of a place she wanted to get to, so it wasn't long before she and James were climbing in through the window and she was demanding, "I don't buy it, Fred, I don't buy any of that crap you just told us. You know how important this summer was, you wouldn't just throw that away, so what's really going on?"
"Nothing," he said sullenly, trying to sink into the bed, away from her gaze, wishing they'd both just leave him alone to be miserable by himself. He did manage to turn away from her, but she put a forceful arm on his shoulder and turned him right back. Glaring at her, he sat up, massaging the spot where her arm and clenched. "What do you want from me?" he asked angrily.
"The truth!" Molly demanded, just as angry. "We're your friends, aren't we? Best friends? That means no secrets!"
"Moll, calm down," James said, stepping between the two of them. "Yelling isn't gonna help, okay?"
For some reason, James's words hurt worst of all. Fred could feel tears stinging his eyes again, and he hated it, because it was embarrassing. He was almost ten years old, for Merlin's sake!
"Fred?" James said then, and if he saw the tears (and Fred knew he did), he didn't act like he did, for which Fred was eternally grateful. "You can tell us. I know you, I know how excited you were for this summer. You wouldn't just forget about it. I heard your dad talking about what you did. It was too deliberate. You had a reason. I know you did."
"You don't understand!" Fred said, almost panicking. "I had to, James. I had to!"
"Had to what?"
Fred looked back and forth between the two of them, and he felt sick to his stomach with everything churning around inside him. And he didn't think he could keep this secret to himself anymore, but he couldn't let his parents find out. He just couldn't. So he said, "You have to promise not to tell. I mean it. Not anyone." James promised immediately, but Molly hesitated. Fred fixed her with a steely gaze. "Promise, or I'm not saying anything," he hissed through clenched teeth.
"Fine," she said, but she didn't look happy about it. "I promise."
"Not your parents or your sister or my parents or anyone," Fred stressed.
"I promise!" she said, impatient. "Now will you tell us what it is you had to do?"
She made it sound so simple, but it wasn't. It wasn't simple at all. It was the hardest thing he'd ever done.
"My parents argue," he said, and Molly interrupted him.
"Yeah, so do mine."
"No, they don't," he said with a shake of her head, trying to make her understand. "Not like mine. Mine fight all the time. They're always yelling, and the only way to make them stop is to make them mad at me."
He once he'd told them that, the rest of it followed, all of it, just spilling out of him in a tirade he hadn't known was waiting to be unleashed. Nobody said anything when he was finished. None of them had anything to say. The whole situation was so beyond what ten-year-olds should have to deal with, and part of Fred knew that, but it was one of those things he just couldn't think about.
"You'd better go," Fred said finally. "You're not supposed to be in here. Go, and get ready for the camp out." They both started talking at that, tried to say that there was no way they were doing it without him, but he cut them off. "No," he said in a hard voice. "Go. Don't give up our perfect summer for me. You guys have fun. Promise."
Miserably, they did, and Fred watched them climb out the window, back toward wherever they were supposed to be. He could feel the anger and unfairness boiling up in him again, but he was scared to let it out because he honestly didn't know if he would end up throwing something or crying, and he was not about to start crying again.
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the doorframe, and opened the door to see both his parents standing in the hall. Sullenly, he crossed his arms. "What?" he asked shortly.
"Fred," his mother said. "We need to talk."
"About what?" Fred demanded. "We already talked about the workshop, and I haven't done anything since then!"
"Fred, please don't yell at your mother," his dad said quietly, and Fred had to forcefully bite back his angry Why not? You do. "We need to talk about something more important than the workshop."
Here it comes, Fred thought dully and sullenly. 'Your behavior is unacceptable.' 'We deserve your respect.' Another lecture that I'm just gonna have to nod and smile through because they don't get it and they never will.
"Fred," his mother said gently, and Fred braced himself. "Have you been acting out to get your father and I to stop fighting?"
The words were so unexpected that he stepped back with the blow of them, full of shock and anger and pain that he couldn't even think about masking. "Molly told you?" he forced out, his whole body stinging from the betrayal. She'd promised -
"Relax, Fred," his dad said, cutting through the fog. "Your cousin didn't give you up. Your Uncle Percy overheard your conversation. He told us. Molly still has your back."
The flash of fury he'd felt toward Molly drained away, but he couldn't relax as his dad had told him to do; the one thing he'd wanted his parents to never find out had still be revealed to them, and now he was gonna have to have the conversation he would give anything to avoid.
He stared at his hands, refusing to look at them, refusing to speak to them. If they wanted to do this, they were going to have to talk first.
"Fred," his dad said, and it was clear from just that one word that his dad didn't have any better idea what to say than James or Molly had, and that should have made him feel better, but it didn't. "Fred," his dad tried again, and then it was like some barrier of forced calm broke down, because the next words were heated and came out in a rush: "How do you not tell us this?"
"George," Fred's mum said, in her warning voice.
"No, Ang," he said. "How do you not talk to us about this, Fred? How do you not tell us that you feel this way?"
"Because I shouldn't have to!"
The words explode out of him, and in the end, that's what sends him over the edge. In all the years he'd put up with the fighting, the screaming, the yelling, both in the background and directed at him, the one thing he'd never dared do was yell back. That was no longer true. A floodgate of his own had opened, and there was no closing it now.
"I shouldn't have to tell you! I shouldn't have to let you know that when you fight and yell and scream all the time, that I hate it! I shouldn't have to tell you that living in a house where you are so angry so much of the time is awful, and that I feel like I can't move or breathe for five months out of every year! You should know all that, you should be able to figure that out, shouldn't that be common sense? Why is it my job to tell you that I don't want to hear my parents yelling at each other all the time? Why is that up to me? You're the parents! You're the adults! I'm nine years old, and it's been this way as long as I can remember, and I hate it! I hate it, and I don't understand why, if you're so angry with each other, why you don't just —"
The thought was there, but he couldn't finish it, couldn't say it out loud, both because that would make it too real and because he was too worked up to say anymore. He was breathing hard and his throat was raw from the screaming and his eyes burned, and he just couldn't anymore. He stood there in his room, with his eyes screwed shut and his breath coming in shuddering gasps and his frozen parents staring at him and not making a move and not saying anything.
"Well, fuck," his dad finally said into the silence, and Fred's eyes flew open at that, because cursing was Not Allowed in their house, certainly not that word, no matter how angry his parents got, and Fred's eyes went to his mother, waiting for her to scold his dad, to reprimand him, but she was just standing there looking at him with tears in her eyes, sadder than he'd ever seen her.
"No," she said softly, in response to the question he hadn't asked. "That about covers it, I think." And that was Fred's first real indication that something Serious had just happened.
He watched his dad turn to his mum then, and right in front of him, they had a Silent Conversation, which floored Fred because he hadn't known his parents could do that. And when they had finished, his mother sat on the edge of the bed and his dad pulled the desk chair around and sat in it backwards, and Fred awkwardly sat at the head of the bed, trying to get his bearings. He had no idea what to expect.
"Fred," his dad said in a quiet and strange voice. "Fred, it's time we told you something important, something we probably should have told you before now."
The words made Fred go cold all over. Sure, he'd thought them, alone in his room some nights, wondering why his parent didn't just split up, wondering if maybe that wouldn't make them happier, but he didn't want them to actually do it, not really, not for real. They were his parents. How could they keep being that if they —
"You aren't, you aren't really, are you?" he managed to make himself ask, and his dad looked confused, confused, of all emotions, like he didn't know what Fred was talking about, like he hadn't just brought it up himself —
And then Fred heard his mum make a little sound of recognition, and then she was beside him on the bed, her arm rubbing circles on his back as she said, "Oh, Fred, baby, no. No, it's not that. Your dad and I are not getting a divorce."
His dad made the connection, then, between what he'd said and what Fred had thought, and he let out a stream of cursing that started with "Bloody hell" and ended with "goddamn," all of which led Fred's mother to say, with gentle reproof, "George. Can we not?"
The world righted itself after that, and Fred felt a little more like there was solid ground under him, and he was able to gulp in a deep breath or two and get himself back under control as his dad stopped cursing and did the same.
"Fred," his dad said again, and now his tone was different, more straightforward, and the words he said were the same. "What you already know, and I know you do, is that your mum and I never planned to be parents. You came along and pushed us into parenthood. And it doesn't mean we love you any less, and it doesn't mean you aren't the best thing that could have happened to us, but becoming parents was not something we decided to do when we felt ready. It was something that happened and we had to scramble to get ready. And I'm not sure we ever really made it. The truth, Freddie, that you need to know is that kids think, and parents want kids to think, that their parents have everything figured out, that they know all the answers, that they're in control. And I don't know, maybe other parents are, but your mum and I aren't. We're making this up as we go along. Fred, the truth is, you don't have the best parents in the world. You probably deserve better than us. But the universe took two broken people and asked them to raise a child. And we do the best we can, but I know we fall short."
Fred looked to his mother then, to see if she would argue or refute anything his dad had said. He didn't know what to think, not yet, and he wanted to see what his mum had to add.
"Your dad's right," his mum said. "And he puts it . . . very well. But Freddie, never doubt, not for one minute, that you are the best thing that ever happened to us. Without you, we wouldn't be sitting here, we wouldn't be a family. You are what cemented us into place way back at the start. You helped us rebuild something that I thought was broken between your dad and I forever. You gave us that, Fred, just by being born. You made us a family. But we are still a family not just because we love you, and Roxie, but because your dad and I love each other, and we want to be a family."
His parents were being so honest with him that Fred felt comfortable saying, "It doesn't feel like it." He felt both his parents sigh and glance away at that, almost guilty.
"No," his dad said after a beat. "I don't imagine it does, sometimes."
They talked for a long time that afternoon, about an awful lot of things, and what Fred was struck by was that his parents had never spoken to him to straightforward before. They weren't treating him like a kid, not once. Part of his head wondered if maybe he shouldn't feel like it was wrong, almost, for his parents to talk to him like he was their equal, telling him things that parents usually didn't tell their kids, but the truth was, he liked the honesty. Because it felt like, for once, they were talking about the things that mattered.
They talked about the uncle Fred had been named for, and how broken and hurting his mum and dad had been when he'd died, and how broken and hurting they still were. They talked about the angry months, and how, when they yelled about dishes and laundry and dinnertime, they weren't really yelling about those things. They talked about how his mum and dad felt that they had to yell about things that could be fixed because if they started yelling about the things that were really wrong, the things that couldn't be fixed, it would all be too much.
They talked a lot that afternoon, about things that they never had before, and Fred got to say the things to his parents that he'd been too afraid to say before, and at the end of the afternoon, Fred knew something Huge had just happened to him, but he couldn't really think about it, not yet.
"We're going to do our best to do better," his mum promised when it seemed like everything had been said. "But it isn't going to happen all at once, Freddie. You're gonna have to be patient with us, and you're gonna have to start speaking up. We will do better by you and Roxie, but if we start slipping, you have to tell us."
"But what if you won't listen?" Fred asked then. "What if I try, and you don't hear me?"
"Then . . ." his dad said, thinking. "We need a word. Something you can say into a fight that means we have to stop and listen."
"Like . . . pause?" Fred suggested. "When we watch Muggle films on Aunt Audrey's VCR and James or Molly or I want to say something, we hit the pause button." Aunt Audrey's Muggle contraptions had long been a source of fascination for all the cousins.
Fred's dad grinned and nodded. "Okay. Yeah. Pause. You say pause, we have to stop and listen to what you have to say. Deal?"
Fred nodded. "Deal," he said, and the three of them shook on it.
"Now you better go," his mum said, and Fred looked at her, confused.
"Go where?" he asked, and she shared a smile with his dad.
"Why, to your camp out, of course," his dad said, ruffling Fred's hair. "James and Molly are waiting."
Fred's face lit up. "You mean it?" he asked, looking back and forth between the pair of them. They shared a long look.
"We mean it," his mum said. "Go on."
Fred hugged both of them once, hard and tight, then ran out the door and bounded down the stairs. He didn't know if he was ready to tell James and Molly everything that had just happened, but he knew some of it would have to come out.
The Angry Months got better after that. When the next Christmas rolled around, Fred watched anxiously, waiting to see what would happen, whether or not his parents would keep their promise, or if they would slip back into the old angry ways. And he could tell they were trying, and they lasted a lot longer. And the first time they started to yell, even just a little bit, Fred was there in the doorway, saying "Pause!" as loud as he could, and he watched his parents freeze and take deep breaths and calm down. And he felt the anxious knot that had been part of him so long start to loosen and fall away.
His family would always be unorthodox. And the Angry Months would never fully go away. But they did begin to get better, and that, Fred knew, was a lot.
I have written in the past about the brokenness that is George and Angelina. The story is called A Hole in the World; you may remember it - it was an angst-fest. Basically, that story was written (for Maggie), and it was about just how messed up the relationship between George and Angelina would always be on some level. And I wanted to explore what it would be like being a kid growing up in the midst of that brokenness, with these two people for parents who are trying so hard but are so very broken and so very in pain.
This is that Fred. I wanted, like James, to get him away from the pure troublemaker that he seems to be portrayed as so often. Here, yes, he gets into trouble and he causes mischief, but there's more than that. My Fred is a very mature kid, all things considered, and a fantastic big brother to Roxie (which we will see more of in her chapter), but no kid can be that mature and deal with things on that level all the time, so the mischief breaks out.
I have a lot to say about this kid, hence the much longer than usual chapter. Kudos to you for getting through it.