Chapter 3

Stuck In The Middle With You

-oOo-

It turned out Death hadn't exactly been honest, which shouldn't have come as a surprise. He was a devious bastard in the Tale of the Three Brothers.

George half expected ending up in King's Cross, but there wasn't much of anything when he opened his eyes. Whitish mist drifted in the air, so heavy you almost could touch it, curling around gnarled bushes stripped of their leaves. You didn't get cold or hungry, but neither did you feel warm. It was a bit like the good room in Granny Prewett's house – it wasn't meant to be used, so it was impossible to feel comfortable there.

There was no way to measure time passing, but George reckoned they had been there for a few weeks when he finally had enough. "If this is what being dead is like, I'd rather have been a ghost! At least they have something to do."

"Yeah, it's like being stuck in History of Magic forever." Fred kicked at a misshapen bush, but his foot went straight through it.

"Don't think that would be any worse than being here, do you?"

"What I don't get is why? If this is what happens when you die, why is there no one else here?" Fred looked around the wasteland for the five hundred and fifty eighth time.

"We thought you'd never ask," said a high-pitch, quavering voice right next to his ear. Suddenly, the empty air was full of other people, somewhere between ghosts and real bodies. Fred was still reassuringly solid, though.

"Blimey," he wheezed, clutching his chest. "If I still had a body, you'd have given me a heart attack.

It fell to George to ask the obvious."Who in the name of Merlin's sodding underpants are you, then?"

Most of them were Muggles, stuck here because they hadn't been good or bad enough to end up elsewhere. Another soul, Lorenzo, who had been a carpenter in Italy before the Black Death killed him, told them the place was called Limbo.

They looked at each other.

"I'm disappointed, George."

"Me too, Fred."

"Not to be bigheaded or anything, but you'd think we'd have made enough of an impression on the world to go up there with Saint Potter and the rest."

"Or the other place, if the man above doesn't have a sense of humour."

"Exactly."

"Mediocrity isn't like us."

"We should have tried harder. I'll always consider it a missed opportunity not to booby-trap Harry's office before he stepped down."

There didn't seem to be much else to say. At least they had someone else to talk to, now.

"George!" Fred drifted closer in the strange way you moved here, without moving at all. "Algernon here is a twin as well," he explained, gesturing to the pale shadow of a boy next to him.

"Yes," Algernon said. "Although I'm alone now, of course."

Fred and George had never acknowledged it, but they both knew they should be able to find people they knew here. If only the Limbo hadn't been so big, and some of the souls so weak, only shadows of living things.

"I'm sorry," Fred said to Algernon, in a way that reminded George he had been a father in the land of the living.

"I don't mind. At least I know Florence has gone to a better place."

"How do you know that?"

"I just know. It's because of the way my soul and her soul are the same, so I can tell she's happy."

"Hang on," George said, remembering some things Death had said eons ago, when he had been far too concerned about Fred dying before he even turned twenty-one to listen properly. "Are you saying you share the same soul?"

"In a way – we were one soul at the beginning, I think, and then we split."

"The sodding bastard! The devious fucking shit!"

Algernon looked taken aback and drifted away; he must have lived a sheltered life. When he was alive.

"What?" asked Fred.

"I've worked it out," George muttered, disgusted with himself. "I could never understand it. Even if I – It never made sense for you to be here. Me, yeah. But not you. You should be in the other place, up there."

"It's all right," Fred said gently. "I'd rather be here with you."

"No, it's not all right!" George burst out. "Because I realise what happened now. That first time, Death said something about twin souls to me, and until Algernon explained it didn't make sense."

"Well, what is it, then?"

George swallowed, or he would have if he still had a throat. "The thing about twin souls. They're actually one and the same soul. That's why Death wanted to make a deal with me in the first place, because to him it's like the soul being dead and alive at the same time. Apparently he doesn't like things being messy. It's only that..."

"Only what?"

"Death didn't tell me he must have taken the bit of our souls that passes on, and left the rest. Left us here. That's why you're not up there."

"How do you make that out?" Fred was still puzzled.

"Because we can see each other clearly, but the others can't. Because we never went to King's Cross, or whatever our equivalent would have been. Because this place isn't quite real to us. It's not Limbo, it's us!"

That was when Fred punched him. His fist connected with George's jaw in an audible blow, here in this place where everything was made of whispers of shadows. The pain took George by surprise. Of all the things to be real here, being hit by his twin hadn't been what he would have guessed.

He didn't blame Fred. Of all the things not to fuck up in life, eternity was top of the list.

THE END