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Disclaimer: J.K Rowling owns the characters and the Harry Potter series, not me. I am in no way affiliated with her or her work.
For days afterwards, George didn't speak. He just couldn't, really.
The ever-present joy appeared to have left his eyes, eyes now vacant of that mischievous glint. His red hair was unkempt and almost matted, and at first people almost didn't recognize him when he let himself be dragged someplace, dragged as he had been by bloodied feet and shaking hands into the ghoulish unknown, because weren't there once two where this lonely, bedraggled one stood now, lost in the wretched aftermath? It seemed like the most inexcusable crime to have lived, while the other did not.
Family members and friends extended both their condolences and their hands, but George didn't respond to either, averted his eyes and shrouded his shredded soul. How could he even finish a single pained syllable, much less a sentence, when the one who used to do it for him was so unbearably…gone? Vanished forever with a flash of green light, leaving behind only a face etched with laughter- his face, in a way, he supposed. Hadn't it taken his mother and father a fraction of a second too long to distinguish which son lay deceased at the shaking body of his grieving twin, a part of the latter having died as well? A mistake invisible to anyone else but him, because then, a split second after the confusion entered their denying eyes it was gone again, for they had realized. Fred- just the name caused his heart to break all over again, crunch beneath his feet and bring hot tears springing to his eyes- was always a shade more reckless than George; if Fred was the jagged blue-white lightning, George was certainly the rolling thunder, not conventionally first but always, always there to follow, sometimes faint but sometimes causing even more ruckus than his predecessor. But no matter what, the two of them together had always been a brewing storm. Now, however, it seemed, there were only dark, sobbing skies, or days too bright and cheerful and too downright mocking to be sincere as the world- funny, how there was still a world now- grew on around him.
On some of the worst days, he couldn't drag himself out of bed and the clinging quilts to go to work, no matter if business was slow or not. It was hard to sell joy when he had none himself, downright impossible to tell jokes when his whole life felt like one, his forced smile, full of broken glass, phantom-like and sharp enough to cut himself up again. Other days, when he woke up in the flat above the joke shop, he convinced himself it was just a terrible dream, until he realized with a pang there was no one else in the house he could barely call a home anymore, and it all came rushing back. Unforgiving, leaving him begging that the fiendish death would just take him, too, when he burrowed back beneath the guilt-ridden sheets, damp with tears.
The worst of these times, these scrambled lunges at a few moments of denial, was probably when he awoke, his face painstakingly tearstained, on a lumpy sofa in the Burrow, the unmistakable red head and freckled face of a family member crouched over him. The scene was familiar- he could've just been hexed with Sectumsempra and had his ear cursed off, his twin, the other half he'd never considered being without, standing anxious above him, wringing his hands. But this time, it was not Fred (a tremor shook his heart, for some reason, at the name he used as often as he breathed) but Ginny, and he had no recollection of what he'd been doing previously- only the slippery fragments of a terrible, terrible dream that drifted a gossamer ghost beneath the surface.
"George?" Ginny asked, peering down at him, tall and slender and pretty. When had she grown up? Wasn't it just yesterday he and his best friend, his brother, his pre-ordered match since birth, sent her a Hogwarts toilet seat? "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he groaned, and Ginny blinked, flabbergasted. "What? Do I not look okay?"
"No, you're fine, I think. Really."
"Fine?" She rolled her eyes. "Look, you're gorgeous. It's just that… we haven't heard you…talk…. in awhile."
George frowned, racking his brain but unable to extract the right information. "How long have I been out, then?"
Ginny tucked a strand of fine red hair behind her ear, bit her lower lip, a fine crimson rose petal paling at the pressure. "A few hours."
"And where is the rest of my dearly devoted family?"
"They're…still outside, George. They all are, except us."
George raised his eyebrows, glanced out the window at the dismal downpour drenching the world with torrential waves. "In this weather? Wow. Say what you will about us Weasleys, but we are nothing if not dedicated. But where is that louse of a brother lucky enough to share my good looks? I know he won't be standing out in the rain. He should be here, fanning me and sponging my forehead until I greet consciousness willingly, Fred should."
It was the first time the name had been spoken aloud within the Burrow in weeks, and it was almost like something shattered loudly, painfully, crumbled to the floor unsteady beneath their feet at the taboo syllables. An irrevocable devastation of a mild sort, strange for it to have been spoken first with ease. But all the same, the world kept spinning, didn't veer off its destined course in the collateral damage even as his sister gasped, a sharp intake of painful breath.
"George…" Ginny whispered, but her voice was so quiet and broken he almost didn't catch it.
"Never mind, I'll straighten him out later. But, Ginny, I had the strangest dream. Shhh- listen, would you? I was looking down at a scene, where another me was lying in a long, narrow box. See, I was surrounded by all these people, but their faces were too blurry to make out proper. Although I think I saw you and Harry snogging somewhere in the crowd"- here he winked good-naturedly at her horrified expression, kidding, of course- "And it was raining, kind of like it is now. But no matter how hard I tried, the me in the box couldn't move. And the box was getting smaller and lower, almost, because soon the square of light above me had gotten so small I couldn't see the crowd."
"George…" she said it again, the heartbroken outline of his name. It sounded strange almost, single and first, coming out of her mouth with no 'and' attached. "That wasn't a dream."
"What? What are you talking about? Of course it was."
"No," Tears were coming now, welling up behind her butterfly eyelashes. "George… earlier today, you fainted. During the funeral. Everyone else is still there."
George's eyes bulged, and he bolted upright, his hand gripping the desperate the edge of the worn sofa's rough material. "Whose funeral?" Ginny buried her face in her hands, unable to say the words George was dreading but so desperately needed to hear. "Fwod's." came the answer, muffled and distorted by her trembling hands and shaking sobs.
"Come again?"
She didn't say a word.
"Ginny, tell me now!"
She looked up at him and shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if begging him not to make her say it again. And all at once, it hit him, hard. The him in the box, that hadn't been him at all, that had been…
"No," he whispered, and something dark slithered its way into his shivering being. "It isn't true." But it was, a horrid dream come alive in all the very worst ways. "Oh, Merlin's Beard, Ginny." And he was reaching out to her, wordlessly imploring the closeness of another human being to chase off the darkness that was rapidly closing in, threatening to snuff out all the hope he had left in the world and all the people he clutched closest to his breast in it.
"I'm sorry, George," his sister whimpered, and he held her tighter, not bothering to scratch away the tears leaking endlessly from his eyes, and hers.
"I feel so broken, Sis," he replied, sniffling, the words pouring past chapped, gaping lips. "I feel like a broken mirror- shattered with all these jagged pieces missing, these dangerous shards that are cutting me up every time I move, every time I try to pretend that nothing's wrong." He struggled for precious breath, knowing his counterpart, the butter to his beer, the punch to his line, the light to his laughter, was six feet under the cold, hard ground, out of reach to him. Not even all the time turners in the world could change his fate, his and Fred's, always tied together and never wanting to be anything other. Not even the most miraculous of spells cast by the Elder Wand from the Boy Who Lived could bring him back now.
"But, oh, God, the worst part, Ginny? The very worst part? I look into that mirror, broken and sharp and threatening, and I don't see an identical face looking back."
Ginny drew back, and wiped a salty rivulet from his cheek. She hesitated a moment before she asked, "Do you want to go? To the… to the funeral? We can probably make it for the very end. We can… we can help put you back together, George."
George nodded, knowing for that to happen he would have to break one last time, a feat that seemed impossible because he was already in shambles, so close to disrepair. The two stood up, the girl summoning an umbrella that George refused to duck under when they slipped out the creaking door. Even the house, it seemed, was in pain, the people in his life bending laboriously as they tried their hardest for him not to break.
It was not until then that George realized he was wearing a black suit, not until the rain had soaked it through and plastered it to his goose-pimpled skin. Water ran off of his arms, his face, his knees, but he did not allow Ginny, a short sodden black dress hanging heavily off her shuddering bones, to shield him from it. He deserved it, after all.
The entire crowd, depressed by the sky and the circumstance, studied the pair half-heartedly as they took their places near the front on the grassy hill. George looked at the patch of muddy earth that separated him from his brother, his flesh and blood and very best friend, and could no longer feel anything. Not Ginny's dripping fingers intertwined tightly with his, or Charlie's hand on his shoulders, racking with sobs he couldn't blame on the rain. All he could feel was that suffocating pain and incompleteness, like a rusted key without a lock to fit into.
He'd needed this, this proof and this bitter closure, no matter how hazardous it was, no matter how he'd have a cold the following day and actually have an excuse to stay within the confines of the lonely flat; he'd needed to know and see through his own blurred vision that Fred was not coming home to him this time. He'd needed to feel this awful pain, feel it in him and on him and around him. He needed all of this because it would eventually help him move on over time, no matter how impossible that prospect seemed at that lonely, broken moment atop the grass within the makeshift graveyard. It would make him remember to live, remember that he hadn't been the one to die in that battle, but never, never dare to forget.
But right then, of course, he wasn't anywhere ready to move on, he and Ginny and his family the last people left lingering and yearning for this all to be a cruel joke, a delirious hoax- he was still too raw and damaged.
Right then, he was still all too ready to believe there was no magic left in the world.
Three hours later, the clan sat huddled before a sputtering hearth in the dimness of night, as if banding together would stop the blackness from seeping in. They held their blistered, trembling hands out, but felt none of its presumed warmth. Rain lashed at the windows, threatening to barge in, but all it would do was provide them with an excuse to why their faces were damp and cool.
"It's getting late." Percy's voice was soft, as it the sentence treaded on shattered glass. He could not look George in the eye as he gave his family a terse goodbye, not after he'd watched the same face fall victim to a whispered word. Just after his slim bespeckled figure disappeared, whirling through the night as he apparated, the twin- could he be called that, when he was only one- rose to his feet heavily, slipping out of a scarred armchair. Twelve eyes watched his movements.
"I guess I should be getting home." The words bled. The flat above the joke shop had never been home, not truly- it was the person in the room just through the wall that made it so.
"George..." It was Bill, scarred everywhere imaginable. His face, his hands, his punctured heart. "You don't have to go."
"Yeah, you can stay," Ginny added hastily, voice hoarse.
"Stay where, Ginny? Our old room?" But he was already pushing through his family and trudging up the stairs, into an inkwell that would soon burn bright with his past, images of happier times branded into the back of his eyelids.
The room was still as he ducked inside, nostalgia stirring like dust beneath his boots, crates of abandoned inventions of dream-like wonder shoved into corners. He walked slowly up to one of the beds, and brushed the bedspread beneath his fingertiips. Fred had slept here, all through their childhood, and through their summers and holidays of their later years, staining the sheets and pillowcases with his mischevious dreams.
He slept beneath the ground, now.
Suddenly winded, the breath ripped from his lungs, George lumbered forward and collapsed onto the other bed, curling into a ball as the door to the bedroom banged shut. Self-imposed exile, where he would cry himself to sleep, filling the room with a subconscious that would meet with his twin almost every night, beauty lacing itself through bittersweet nightmares, lingering in the air as he'd wake up, longing.
It was sometime much later in the night that the door opened on magically silent hinges, and in crept the lithe figure of a teenage girl, clothed in a lilac nightgown, her hair a crown of reddish silk and her feet bare across the wooden planks of the floor. Her lips pressed tightly together in concentration, her sorrow about to overflow, Ginny wordlessly cast a spell onto the pillow of the opposite bed, Fred's bed, making it temporarily reflective, like a woefully intact mirror, before slipping out again.
So that when George did wake up, she knew, the first thing he'd see was his brother's face, one last time, before it vanished, as if it had been watching over him. As if it always had.
And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough of a goodbye.