A/N: I apologize for the tardiness of this one, but I had to get all geared up for college and move. That consumed a great deal of my time in the last week and I am here to tell you that I am still exhausted. But since I've gotten so many reviews for this, and I know that Fred and George still have a ways to go in this story, here it is…
The Other Side of Goodbye
Chapter Three: Fear and Regret
"Together we climbed hills and trees
Learned of love and ABCs
Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees
Adieu, Emile, it's hard to die
While all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
Pretty girls are everywhere
Just think of me and I'll be there
We had joy, we had fun
We had seasons in the sun
But the hills that we climbed
Were just seasons out of time"
"Seasons In the Sun" The Beach Boys
For reasons no more complex than familiarity, Fred swallowed. It both occurred and escaped him, what had just come to pass over his lips. Dead, he thought. He felt his chest tighten, and there was a brief illusion that his heart had stopped beating. His breath, so unnecessary, ceased and a part of him still marveled that he was not growing heavy-headed like he had when he and George had been little, having breath-holding contests.
Even though James Potter could not have weighed more than a bit of fluff, Fred could feel the stair he was sitting on bend ever so slightly as the angel in spectacles sat beside him. Fred wished… or perhaps he didn't… that James would say something. Anything.
Anything that could help with this unbearable, wretched pain and sorrow that was consuming every fiber of him. He had only felt like this once before, when George had lost his ear. It had been the briefest of moments, now that he looked back on it, when he simply stopped working and hung in gut-wrenching suspense to find if George's mind had gone.
But then George had told him a joke, and the fear and pain and sorrow had vanished without a trace.
Fred desired more than anything for George to tell him a joke right that instant, to sit beside him with a smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. That had been how they had dealt with such horrible feelings—laughter and joy. Though they had never discussed it outright, the twins had felt it had been their duty to give happiness to those around them. They had been Gryffindors, and they could duel, but they were not Harry Potter. They fought the war on a different front; if people lost their ability to laugh… Voldemort won.
He vaguely wondered if he would ever feel the things he and George had worked so hard to give others again.
"It is tough to come to grips with, Fred. I realize that," James whispered beside him. He was watching Molly with a strange look on his face. "Not many realize that… that it is the ones who leave who have the harder time with it."
Fred sniffled, wishing his tears would fall, instead of bottling up in his eyes and making him think he would explode. "You mean…" his voice was cracked and reedy, as though he had been crying for hours, "because we can watch them, and be so close…"
He could not bear to finish when he saw Ginny break away from their mother and come bounding up the stairs, passing right through him. She disappeared into her room, snapping the door closed behind her. She did nothing to hide the sound of her grief from coming into the halls.
"They can convince themselves that we have moved on to a better place," James said more to himself than his companion, eyes glazed and unfocused. "Which we have, in a way. But sometimes I wonder… I wonder if the ones who keep going didn't get the better deal. They can… they can keep going, keep living… locking us away in fond memories and photos. All we do is… sit on a cloud and watch them do those things. All we have is time."
Fred exhaled shakily and got to his feet. James looked up at him, tears glistening, and knit his brows together.
"Where are you going?"
Fred looked down at him. "I have to find George," he said, voice raising just above a whisper. "He's… he's alone now. I--I can't let him be alone." He faltered slightly, staring down at Harry's father. "He—he hates being—being… by himself."
James rose and rested a hand on Fred's shoulder. "Well, come on then."
A tingle of anger zipped through him when James instantly brought them to the attic. Couldn't they have walked? He wanted to walk, to allow himself to get lost in The Burrow in ways he should have done when he was alive. The anger subsided quickly when he spotted his twin, genuinely alone for the first time in his existence, sitting in the window of the attic.
George had always been quieter, that was true. He had been gentler and sweeter—definitely much quicker to end a joke if someone's safety was in the balance. He had been the one who kept Fred grounded, who had kept him in reality. Fred had often thought that if George had been a single, he would have turned out a bit more like Percy or even Hermione. He had been the one who studied (somewhat) before their exams and cued Fred to the answers through various body signals they had agreed on in advance. He had been the one most hesitant to break any serious rules; he had wanted to back out of blackmailing Ludo Bagman.
Yet, in spite of all of George's ability to grasp and deal with his emotions better than his twin, Fred could not recall a time when George had been so quiet. He had cried, he had shouted, he had done all that one could do as long as they made a sound. He had not heard George say a single word since entering The Burrow, and a strange fear grew in his chest.
Fred slowly approached George, which he could not recall ever doing before. They had always tackled or chased each other. There was no hesitancy between them.
He could feel the grief coming off of George in waves… no… typhoons. He took a few steps closer and halted when he heard George choke back a sob. Fred wanted to die all over again, just because of the pain he knew he was causing his family, his twin. Trying to keep a grip on what he had only realized shortly ago, he struggled to remember that he could not return to George in the way he wanted to.
But he could sit here beside him, and hope that maybe somehow George would know he was there, comforting him.
"George?"
It was James alone who looked to see who was coming into the room the next morning. George, who had not made a sound except for the occasional escape of a sob or a sniffle, had moved from his seat in the windowsill to an old armchair that faced the window. He had been staring out of it since James and Fred had arrived, watching songbirds flit in and out of the tree outside or the stars twinkling overhead.
In the night, he had knit his brows in thought, tears silently falling. Fred had known instantly that George was searching the heavens for his lost brother. He did not know, could not feel, him sitting there at his feet with a hand laid on top of his.
The door creaked, allowing Arthur and Molly to peak their heads into the room. George did not move. For all anyone could tell, he had stopped breathing and blinking. He may have been a George made of wax.
"George, darling… we… we brought you something to eat." Molly stepped into the attic, floorboards creaking, carrying a tray with a spread of food upon it.
The floorboards seemed to bring Fred and George to their senses, because both looked at their mother at exactly the same moment. A strange feeling gripped Fred as he watched Molly approach with a tray full of food that had been reserved only for birthdays, grieving, and days spent in bed with a fever and rain pouring down.
George's favorite treats were all on the platter she carried, save for one thing: a small bowl of cherry jellybeans sat on a corner of the tray. Fred glanced to George, awaiting his reaction. George hated cherry jellybeans—they had been Fred's favorite. George preferred strawberry.
George blinked so slowly that Fred was reminded of Professor Binns.
"You should eat something, dear," Molly urged, setting the platter on the arm of the chair.
There was oatmeal topped with strawberries and blueberries, pumpkin juice, a green apple, jellybeans, and George's favorite: white toast with butter and cinnamon. George loved fruit, and he loved toast. Fred had enjoyed waffles with cream, bacon, pumpkin juice with a dash of cinnamon, and chocolate frogs. That had been the breakfast he got when he was ailing.
George stared down at the food, not saying a word until, "Mum… F-Fred… I—I don't like ch-cherry… but… thanks."
He looked away from Molly then, who looked distraught by her error, and continued to stare out the window.
George did not eat any of the food Molly had left (even the strawberry jellybeans she had placed in the stead of the cherry ones). Fred had tried to get him to, by struggling to push the tray toward George, but had not succeeded. James had fallen asleep in the corner, bunched up in a ball.
Fred had not known angels slept.
When George finally got up from his chair, Fred was surprised. There was no expression on his twin's face. He was moving strangely, as if being controlled by a spell or the strings of a puppet master. James slept on, and Fred got to his feet, following George until he halted outside of their bedroom.
He studied the door much as he had when he had last stood before it. An outsider may have thought he did not understand the concept of a door, but Fred knew that he was trying to find the courage to enter the room on the other side. After several moments of stretching his fingers out and retracting, George finally twisted the knob and pushed.
The room was exactly as Fred remembered leaving it. His bed was neatly made, as was George's, because Molly had been on a cleaning binge even after the wedding. She had straightened up everything constantly, and had admonished her son for messing it up by sitting on it.
The sight seemed to anger George, who was also studying the bed that had been his twin's. Tears brimmed in his eyes and he angrily marched toward it, yanking the sheets loose and throwing the pillows into disorder. He said nothing. When he finished, he seemed satisfied: the bed was now how Fred would have left it.
George stood in the center of the room, looking almost as lost as he had in the living room previously. Finally, after what seemed to be an hour, he sat down at the desk that had been Fred's. He ran his fingers over the stacks of parchment that had no order to them, eyed the quills with chewed-up ends, and looked at the few pictures Fred had put up on the wall. Fred also got tangled in the images, standing behind George and looking over his head.
The twins were in one, standing aboard the Hogwarts Express, leaning out the window and waving to their family as the train pulled out of the station. They also graced the next two, though they were no longer alone. Ginny stood between them in one, each of her brothers weaving one side of her hair into French-braid pigtails. She had been about nine in that picture—she had never learned to braid herself. The third was the family in Egypt, though it was the original copy and not a clipping from The Daily Prophet. Finally, there was Fred and George with Harry and Ron after a snowball fight in the courtyard at Hogwarts, red in the face and looking so happy they were practically glowing.
George got up from the desk and moved to his own, which also had pictures on the wall before it.
He opened a drawer and pulled out some parchment and a quill. He began to scribble away, and as Fred leaned over to read what George was writing, he felt James' hand on his shoulder and a strange tugging behind his backbone. By the time he had turned to ask James what was going on, they were again surrounded by clouds.
"What the--?"
"Our time was up, I'm afraid," James stated in a melancholy voice.
Fred felt anger surge up in his chest. "What do you mean??"
"Angels can only stay on Earth for a short while… you and I would have been ripped back here within seconds, and believe me, that hurts much more than what I just did."
"But I was with George!"
"I know, Fred, I know. But we were with him for nearly two days… we should not have stayed even that long. But," he said quickly, seeing Fred flare up, "we can go back within a day or so. We cannot stay as long then, but we can go back."
Fred made to argue further, but James silenced him with a hand over Fred's mouth. The gaze he fixed on the redhead was enough to kill the words read to tumble over Fred's lips. When James lowered his hand, all Fred was able to do was stare at him.
"I'm sorry, Fred."
The pit of Fred's stomach felt like he had swallowed several metal weights. He inhaled deeply, searching for a way to give words to the feelings he wanted to express. "You… you really are, aren't you?"
James took a half of a step back and nodded solemnly. "Yes, I am. I… I remember what it was like." He knit his brows together and cast his eyes to the side. "How inexplicably horrendous it was to be ripped from the only world I had ever known and the only people I had ever loved… yes, I remember. It felt like… dying, for lack of a better word."
He sniffled, and Fred felt the fight in him cease to exist.
"It was like… dying." James shook his head. "That's the only way I can explain how I felt. I left my life so suddenly, so quickly, that like you… I didn't know I was gone." His angelic eyes began to fill with tears that could not fall. "I didn't realize that I had been stolen away from my life. One second I was standing my ground with a bolt of green light coming at me, and the next I was lying on a cloud staring up at the sun."
Fred took a step closer to James and laid a comforting hand on his arm. He had never been good at knowing what to say to make someone's tears vanish, or their fears run away, and he felt strange. Even when Ginny had been little, and crawled into his bed during terrible storms, all he had been able to do was to tell her jokes or read her favorite book to her.
George had been the one who had always known what to say.
James shook his head again, this time a bit more angrily, as if trying to shake the memory of his death away. He succeeded somewhat, Fred, decided, but he did have one last thing to say about it.
"I can't tell you that it gets easier, Fred. I won't lie to you. Bernard probably told you that once you enter the Gates, all the pain you ever felt goes away. I know that mine hasn't left yet, and maybe that's because Harry is still down there. Perhaps I won't lose all of my pain until he's here—everyone else I loved is here now, except for my son.
"Even if you get your wings, Fred, and even if you go into those Pearly Gates… some little part of you will remember George, and your family, and your friends, and how it hurt to leave them against your will. That pain won't stop until they are here with you… and even then it might not. You've got a lot of people to wait for… and they, in turn, will have someone to wait for.
"Funny thing, isn't it?" James let out a mirthless laugh. "I always thought… that when I died… if I got to Heaven… I wouldn't hurt anymore. I wouldn't be scared, or miss anyone. The war would a million lives away, and I wouldn't sit up every night next to Harry's crib, hoping we would see the next morning's light."
James no longer seemed to be talking to Fred. "I wasn't afraid to die. I knew it had to happen someday. I always reckoned I wouldn't make it to thirty, but I guess I always hoped deep down that I would watch my son get married and die with grandchildren around my bed. I didn't get that. I got death at 21, on my favorite holiday, and I watched my son grow up at a distance that I can't comprehend fully. But… I wasn't afraid to die. I was afraid… to not live."
James looked up when he finished speaking and fixed Fred with a questioning gaze. "Were you afraid?"
Fred knit his brows together in thought.
"… and then he said, 'To the organized mind, death is but the next great adventure', or something like that." Harry plopped down on the couch next to Hermione.
Fred sat near the fireplace, playing chess with Ron and trying to devise a way to finally beat the snot out of his little brother at this stupid game. George was next to him, flipping idly through a Quidditch Quarterly magazine.
"Sounds silly, if you ask me," said Ron, taking one of Fred's pawns.
"Luckily nobody did," Fred snipped, trying to find a way to retaliate. If all else failed, he thought, he had some itching powder in his trunk upstairs.
"Well, I just mean… how's it an adventure? You already know where you're going—" Ron said defensively.
"Do you, now?" George asked without looking up from his reading.
"Yeah, Heaven. If you do all the good things you should and whatnot, you go there, right? And if not, you go straight to H—"
"Ron!" Hermione admonished, and he stopped long enough to give her a look that quite plainly said 'Oh, please'.
"And if you go to Heaven, well, I reckon it can't be that bad. Unless you have to play a harp and fly about with a nancy-boy white dress on." Ron shrugged as he took another of Fred's pieces.
"So long as I go laughing, I don't really care," Fred replied, happily snagging Ron's rook.
George gave an appreciative laugh and they high-fived. "Only way to go, if you ask me: laughing."
"You would say that," Hermione interjected, giving Fred and George scornful, motherly glares. "Everything is a joke to you two."
"So what if it is?" Fred asked, looking up from the game. "Better to live a little than to hide beneath the beds, shaking and trying to avoid the inevitable, I think. 'sides, what's wrong with dying with a laugh?"
"Death isn't funny, George!"
"I'm Fred, actually, Miss Smarty."
She gave a sound of disgust. "Ugh, whatever—Fred! Death is… it's serious, and it's definitely no laughing matter."
"Then how do you want to go?" Ron asked.
Hermione looked appalled as well as intrigued by this question. "I don't know… probably in my sleep after finishing up a good book."
"Shocker there," George muttered.
"And how about you, then, George? How do you want to die?" She appeared as though she felt herself one up on the twin, crossing her arms over her chest and feeling superior. "I mean really, now."
George allowed the magazine he was reading to slip from his grasp slightly. "Really? You really want to know what I think about death?"
"Morbid little hairball, isn't she?" Fred asked.
"I really want to know, George. You and Fred are always laughing, always joking… don't you have one serious thought, even about death?" She narrowed her eyes. She was testing him, Fred thought.
"Alright," George said, straightening up and fixing her with an equally steely gaze. "I'll give you a serious thought about death: it happens. To everyone. We all have to go sometime, right? No matter what we do, we're going to end up in a graveyard on some miserable hill, with flowers and a huge rock with our name on it. Personally, I'm going to enjoy every bloody second I have in this life, and I want to die with a smile on my face and a laugh in my heart. I don't want to die with tears in my eyes or some cancer eating away my insides. I spend my time making people laugh, and that's how I want to die. I'm not scared of it."
"Me either," Fred told George. "I feel the same," he said to the rest of the group. "I'm not scared. If we're good people, we go to Heaven. Everyone we know is there, hopefully, and I think if I die laughing that it'd be much better than dying any other way."
"So long as we go together, of course," George half-joked.
"Oh, push off and get your own death," Fred joked, shoving his twin's shoulder slightly.
"Oy, you almost pushed me into the fire—"
Fred swallowed. "No… no… I wasn't scared. I went into Hogwarts knowing what might happen. We all talked about it before we went in. We knew not everyone was going to make it out of the castle. But—"
"You thought George would be here too," James finished for him.
He nodded. "Well, yeah. We… we shouldn't have split up. George didn't want to. I didn't either. But… we had to. We couldn't expect Colin to lead a group, could we? George and I knew how to duel." He sniffled, feeling the moment of his death rush back upon him. "I didn't even say goodbye.
"I never said goodbye to any of them. Not even George. My whole life… I never once said goodbye to him. Wherever I went, he followed. I went where he did. I couldn't bear… I couldn't… I couldn't be more than a room away from him, and even then, it was hard. It wasn't… right. And now I'm a whole world away."
"You'll get to say goodbye, Fred, I promise," James whispered, no hint of humor on his face. "I promise."