Ginny

She tried to deny it at first. Pretend as if it never happened. She would look at George sometimes and just tell herself that it was him even though in her heart she knew it wasn't. Not when he turned around and she saw the scarring where his ear should have been. Not when he put his arm over her shoulder from the right side instead of the left and certainly not when he hadn't smiled since the day he sobbed over the body of his other half.

She was angry when she came to these revelations. Furious at the world for the happiness it had drained from her and her family. In private she prayed to gods she hardly knew the names of in hopes that just one of them would respond and return her family to normal. Nightmares haunted her at night with different images of her brother's broken body on the floor of the castle that she had spent half her life in and the other half dreaming about. She could hardly believe that she would never hear his laugh again, would never see the twinkle in his eye or never have her hair dyed in the shower by him again.

Eventually she came to accept it. Years later she would visit his grave and just speak, every 1st of April, every Christmas Day, every 2nd of may and whenever she got the idea into her head that she needed her older brother. She would sit down and lean against the headstone as if it were still his warm body with his arm slung over her shoulder from the left side and she would speak. She would talk about her children and the little pranks that James would play on Albus and she would imagine his mischievous smirk replying insisting that it was the Weasley side that James inherited his skills from regardless of the fact that her sons grandfather was a Marauder. She would imagine the twinkle in his eye as he heard about her time playing as chaser for the Holyhead Harpies and the pride that he would have in her. She would speak about everything she could think of and more and when she would arrive home with red rimmed eyes her husband would just nod his head in understanding and wrap his arms around her as they just remembered the man they had lost.

Ron

The grief hit him hard and it hit him fast. They say that grief comes in 5 stages beginning with denial but he skipped directly to the second stage: anger. He joined the aurors with Harry for revenge against the men who had done this. He wanted nothing more than to hunt them down and do exactly to them as they did to his brother.

He had never thought of himself as vengeful but he supposed looking back years later that it made sense. He was always quick to anger and spite came too easily to him and clung to him like nothing else. So he supposed his actions during the mission on the morning of Friday October 6th 1998 should have been predictable. He had been with his team staking out a heavily warded cottage where 7 death eaters were holed up when one of his colleagues found a way in. Just minutes later a team had been formed to enter, himself being one of them. When he saw the piles of bodies pile up outside the front door, topped with a lanky red-head he saw red. It wasn't his lanky red head but it sent him places he thought he had left behind. At the end of the mission 7 more bodies joined the already high pile. All cloaked in black with tattoos on their left forearms. All dead by the same willow with unicorn hair wand.

The next Monday on the 9th of October he resigned from his position as auror. He joined his brother at Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes where continued his lost brother's memory of cultivating the future pranksters of Great Britain and making sure that his brother's name would never be forgotten. While there he helped George with inventing some of their most successful products yet including the teddy bear that turned into a large hairy spider. This product became a success with young pranksters wanting to terrorise their younger siblings.

George

He avoided mirrors for months. The first one he looked into after the battle had a large fist shaped hole in the center of it and his right hand had an interesting looking scar across his knuckles. But this scar was nothing compared to the one that he carried around every day for the rest of his life.

This scar was one that would never heal. One that would not fade with time. This was a scar that no ointment or medicine would fix, not that he hadn't tried. For 6 months after the battle he attempted to fill the gash in his life with liquor. He would drink until he saw his reflection in the bottom of the bottle and the wound reopened tenfold. He would be filled with guilt knowing that this wasn't what his brother would have wanted but the cycle would continue.

His only solace was the shop. The place that him and his brother had dreamed about their entire lives, put so much work into and their pride and joy. It wasn't the same without his twin and would never be but this was a project that he could not mess up with his grief. This was a project that was meant to inspire happiness into the lives of everyone it touched and he couldn't let his grief tarnish his borther's work. So every day Tuesday to Saturday from 12pm to 8pm (because why would the Weasley twins force themselves to work at ungodly hours in the morning or on Mondays) he would get up and pull himself together to continue his brother's work.

It did get easier eventually, when Ron joined him to work at the shop he had someone to bounce ideas off of again. With time looking in the mirror was no longer as painful as it had been and he was able to imagine how his twin would have aged beside him. Later when he looked into the eyes of his son and named him after his brother his scar was just as fresh as ever but he was able to use his memories of their time together a a balm to sooth the wound.

Though he did tear up every time he glanced at the picture of the two of them with long white beards and wrinkly skin from when they tried and failed to enter the triwizard tournament.

Percy

He threw himself into his work in an attempt to forget that he was the last person to ever hear the man's laughter. To forget that it was him he was fighting alongside when he died. He tried to ignore the thoughts that it should have been him as they sat around the dinner table in the Burrow every Sunday. He was struggling with the fact that he never really knew the man who had died. His brother that he hadn't had a full, civil conversation with in years because every one of their interactions ended with him screaming at his younger brothers for whatever they had done that time.

He over analysed every one of these event wondering what he could have done differently what he could have changed in order to join in on their jokes instead of being the butt of their jokes. He came up with a solution every time, but every time the opportunity presented itself for him to act on his plan he ended up red in the face and screaming at the twins again because he just never knew how to execute his plans properly.

There was one event in particular that he analysed the most though. For years he had nightmares about what he could have done differently. He could've pushed his younger brother out of the way and taken the hit instead. He could've gotten to him faster, he could've known more healing spells he could've done anything, something differently. Every time in his dreams though he executes his plan wrong, every time he digs through rubble only to find his younger brother's broken body with no life left in his eyes.

At the Sundays at the Burrow he finds himself joining in with his brothers jokes, he was no longer red in the face at the thought of his brothers pranks instead he joined in and laughed alongside them. At least one of his plans had gone right.

Charlie

He wasn't there that night. He hadn't made it in time and he wonders what would have changed if he did. He had found a witch living a 4 hour broom ride away from the reserve who would make him and the other dragon tamers he had managed to recruit in Romania an illegal portkey to Hogsmeade in hopes that they would make it in time to help fight against the Dark Lord and his followers. They had sprinted to the castle he had once called home only to find it in ruins with the battered bodies of students, death eaters and members of the Order being collected by the exhausted victors.

His colleagues spread out helping the injured in any way they could while he had had only one thought on his mind. He raced through the vast corridors of Hogwarts, his heart pumping faster than it ever had before only for it to come to a complete stop when he saw the unmoving body of his brother laid down, surrounded by the other red-heads he called family.

A week later at the funeral that was held in the orchard behind his family home, he had hung his head in shame at the thought that he wasn't there to save the brother he had grown up with, the brother he had taught how to fly, the brother that made him laugh every time he saw him, without fail. This time though, as they lowered the body to the ground and he got one last look at his brothers face he could not find it within him to laugh.

As the years passed however, the memory of his brother started to make him smile and later laugh. He fondly recalled the pranks that the twins would play on him and the times that they played quidditch above the orchard. Now, whenever they play as a family at the burrow, the siblings lay a beaters bat beside his headstone because they could never play a game without their joyous brother holding his bat.

Bill

It was always his job as the eldest child to protect his siblings. Whether it was pulling Charlie away from dodgy looking animals, coercing Percy away from his books so that he could get a breath of fresh air, protecting the twins from themselves, protecting Ron from the twins or catching Ginny whenever she tried to go too high on her broom as a child, it was his job to protect them.

He had thought he could do it forever, keep them safe from harm. The war royally messed that plan up though. Ron ran away with his trouble-magnet friends, Ginny went back to school into the clutches of the very people they were at war against, his parents were displaced from their home, Percy alienated from their family with no contact and the twins started a rebel radio station where they did the bare minimum to keep their identities hidden. Miraculously however they were all still alive when the battle began. He had prayed for it to stay that way but whatever was up there didn't listen. When he limped into the Great Hall with his wife pressed against his side he had almost collapsed when he saw his family huddled together, shoulders heaving and loud sobs coming from their direction.

At that time he hadn't known who it was but it didn't matter. He had lost one of the people he had spent his whole life trying to protect. He had failed at the most important job he had ever been given. With a lump in his throat he stumbled towards his family only for the lump to be released in a shriek like sob when he saw the crushed corpse of his brother who was once so full of life he could light up a whole room.

He dealt with the guilt of being unable to protect his brother for his whole life but eventually he managed to realise that it wasn't his fault, that his brother was an adult who chose to fight in a battle that he knew the risks of. He came to terms with the fact that the only people who could take the blame for his brother's death were dead or in prison and he decided to be proud that he had managed to keep his rambunctious brother alive for 20 years full of risky pranks and near death experiences that somehow always ended up with laughter.

Arthur

Standing where his son was laid to rest in the orchard became a past-time of his. He could spend hours just standing there with his right hand placed on the top of the headstone as he stared blankly out into the darkness of the apple orchard, his back turned to the house he had built for his family, the house that his middle child would never set foot in again.

He couldn't process what had happened. His brain understood it too well but in his heart he still had 7 children who were too competitive for their own good. In his heart 9 red-heads sit around the dinner table on Sundays even though his eyes only acknowledge 8.

This would continue until his ginger hair turned white and his freckled skin wrinkly. Until the day he died his heart believed that all his children were still with him. He always imagined his lost son growing old and continuing his life as though the events at the battle never happened because he was never able to process the fact that his son was indeed dead.

Molly

The sight of her son's broken body on the floor of the Great Hall was quite literally her worst nightmare. She had seen this picture before, in her worst dreams and with her bogarts but she had never imagined that she would witness the real thing.

She couldn't believe it, not until she arrived home only to see his handle that was once ticking around her spelled clock lying on the ground while every other handle was pointed to "home". She hardly noticed her family behind her, watching with bated breaths as she gingerly raised the handle from the ground with heaving shoulders. She brought her arms up to place her sons handle beside the ones labelled "Fabian" and "Gideon", her two brothers, twins who had fallen during in the first war.

It was at this moment that it clicked for her. She knew it in her head and she knew it in her heart that her son had joined her brothers and the idea of it pained her like no other. It became a ritual for her to gaze at the orchard as she prepared meals and took time to remember her son. She was so proud of him and one of her biggest regrets was that he would never know it. She now regretted being so adamant against her twins starting their own business and tried to amend that by encouraging George in any way she could. She remembered her son in her own ways, as her most clingy baby by far. The one who would shriek when she wasn't in sight as a toddler (it was how she could tell the twins apart when they were younger). She remembered him as the charismatic child that could bring a grin to even the most grim faces.

She made sure that her beloved son was never forgotten about by laying out a plate and cutlery for him at every family meal and by knitting a cozy top with a large "F" embroidered into it every Christmas.

In loving memory of Frederick Gideon Weasley, brother, son & prankster extraordinaire, 1st April 1978 - 2nd May 1998.