He floo-ed into the main living quarters of The Burrow.
"Mum?" he called out softly and she answered him from the kitchen.
"Elevenses," she said when he entered, her back to him, lifting the kettle off the hob. She filled the pot on the table, set the kettle back down and wiped her hands on her apron before moving towards him, her arms open and her smile warm.
He hugged her, bending low. "Are you shrinking, Mum?"
She laughed but didn't answer and they both sat at the table.
The weather, politics, changing seasons, upcoming hols, and finally George rolled his eyes. "It's okay, you know. I'm not spun glass. We can talk about things that actually matter."
She was wounded and he felt a small prick of answering pain. "I'm sorry, Mum. I didn't mean that against you."
She nodded and wiped her eyes with the cloth napkin beside her plate. "I don't know what to say, Georgie. Not sure why you're here. You said something about the Hogwarts trunks…and well, you know it's a rare thing for you to come for tea."
Contrite. "I know. I've been scarce. For too long. I think," he reached out, long fingers tracing a pattern into the tablecloth, around the yellow daisies chained into the taupe-coloured linen, "I'm ready to come back."
Molly put her hand over his busy fingers. "I'm so very happy, George, to hear that. So very, very happy. Your father, too. Maybe someday you'll tell us where you're coming back from, but right now I just want to welcome you home."
He smiled, still looking down, but turned his hand over and grasped her fingers in his own. "No more crying now. I've got to be done with that, right?" He looked up at his mother, nodding and she nodded back.
She rubbed two quick fists under her eyes and finished her cup of tea. "Now, your trunks are in the attic and no one's touched them. All the rest have cleared theirs out. Doesn't mean the attic is any less of a complete shambles." She giggled then trailed off, catching his gaze. "Why are you asking about them now, George? Twenty years since you and Fred stowed them away there and I'm sure you haven't thought of them once in all that time."
"That's true. I haven't. But I need…." He stood quickly, wiping his mouth with his napkin and folding it into a rectangle before dropping it onto his plate.
His mother reached out for his hand. "You need to what, darling?"
He held her hand and looked across the room, out the window over the sink, into the far-reaching yellow fields that stretched around the Burrow. "I need to remember."
She nodded, wiping her own mouth, then her eyes again. He could see that she had no idea what he was talking about, what he wanted to remember. What he needed to remember.
"Do you want me to go up with you, George?"
He shook his head, his eyes gentle. Then he moved to stand beside her chair and began rubbing her thick shoulders, her neck. He leaned over and hugged her. "I won't be up there long. I don't think anyway. Want to play Mouse & Cat before I go up?"
She nodded and together they cleared the table and sat back down with the cards. An hour of laughter and teasing and rogue hands and lightning fast discards until George charmed the deck into a handful of mice that scampered off the table top and quickly towards a hole in the baseboard by the door. But just as quickly, they flattened back into playing cards and fell to the floor.
George climbed the final narrow winding rickety staircase to the attic. Dust moted light filtering through windows dark with aged grime and cobwebs. He stood at the top of the stairs and let his eyes adjust, looking around at old pieces of furniture that had not moved since long before he and Fred had been born and could very well remain staggered in its jumbled uselessness long after he was dead. There were wardrobes and chifforobes, davenports and gateleg tables. He suddenly was hit with a body memory of clambering over a precariously leaning cabinet in order to leap down behind it and hide alongside Fred from Percy and Bill and Charlie on a rainy afternoon. He winced. The feel of Fred's narrow boy shoulder wedged into his chest, the tight breath-holding as they looked at each other with wide eyes trying to keep from tell-tale giggling, the complaining length of hamstring, squatting thigh-to-thigh in the gloomy dark, knowing that at any moment Fred would reach over and pinch the nerves in his knee and he would collapse helplessly, legs shaking. The clean smell of his twin brother's unruly shock of hair and the unwashed smell of his ears. He knew that if he closed his eyes he would be trapped in the memory until the flesh wasted off his bones.
He turned away and peered into a corner and there were the two matching trunks.
Slowly he approached them, a bit wary now of the unbidden memories. But he had come for that very reason, to remember, to coax out the slumbering beast of memory and see if it devoured him or let him stroke it into gentleness. He squatted down in front of one the twin trunks, both pressed together back to back. He knew immediately which one was his and which one was Fred's and had no clear idea of how he recognized the difference, but he did. He reached out for the clasp and sat back heavily, his arse on the floor, as the padlock zapped him with a spit of electric fire.
He laughed. Of course. But had he really become unrecognizable to his own spell? He supposed after twenty years, he had. And in a way, this was exactly what he had come for, to find out whom he had been then and who he was now. He crossed his legs, guru-style, and pondered the hasp, tongue on his upper lip, eyebrow raised. He muttered a long-forgotten string of words and reached out again only to have the fire leap into the tip of his fingers and numb his hand. He could not stop himself from busting out in a brief laughter. Why would he have spelled the lock? Another answer to his being there – could he remember the complicated simplicity of being seventeen years old?
He sat in front of the trunk while the sun climbed up the sky, hung at full noon, and then began its steady descent. It was early evening and George had both hands palm-flattened on the floor, head forward and eyes closed. The lock was forever fastened, the trunk closed to him. And he had tried Fred's as well, with the same result, although Fred's shock was more pleasure than pain and even that was a mystery. He had tried to clear his mind and summon the memories he'd come in search of, but something was keeping them from surfacing. He could not say whether that something was prohibitive or protective, but regardless, his Hogwarts years had become a Muggle photo album of still faded snapshots not the magical moving memories he had wanted to study. He stood, a bit unsteady on his feet after so many hours seated, and stretched tall. He nodded to himself and found that there was no frustration, no grief at this discovery. Somewhere locked inside the trunks he and Fred had buried so much of the experiences of their teenaged lives in his memories, their memories, were stored. They were safe there, and, he decided, without Fred to help him remember how to retrieve them, they were where they belonged.
He pulled the attic door shut behind him, made his way back down to the kitchen where his father was now and he accepted his parents' invitation to a light supper.
Later, lying on his bed, sober and tired, he fell into a dream in which he was a Muggle. In the dream he was holding a red and gold coloured scrum cap, walking through a very old graveyard. He was looking for a headstone, reading inscriptions on marbles as he wandered amongst the graves, but not recognizing any of the names or dates. But suddenly, he was standing in the place he'd been looking for and he knelt down, the cold earth damp on his trousers, and he laid the cap in front of the stone and wept. And in the dream, the stone bore both Fred's name and his own.