He scratches around the scrap of cartilage that still exists of his left ear. The Severing Hex from a year ago had, thankfully, spared the minimal tragus he had. Magical reconstruction fails him here, with the nerves and hearing ability, but George has mostly made peace with it. At least piercings on that ear are still in his future, he thinks ruefully.
Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes – the apostrophe exists inaccurately now, George intrusively realises – has kept its original store in Diagon Alley, and business has been well since the war. Rebuilding and recuperating essentials are, well, essential, of course, and a joke shop is decidedly not essential, but children are still children and must have fun while the adults stock up on boring adult stuff that holds no interest for them. George isn’t exactly desperate to be rich – as long as there’s a profit, but even if there isn’t, he has his swanky war hero money to fall back on and their savings from before the war.
His savings, now.
A markdown in prices, while generous, is not at all costly to George. He’s mostly perfected recipes and spells; no experimentation for the time being – Bill needs babysitting about three days to a week every month to make sure he doesn’t chew up his very pregnant, very (reportedly) tasty-smelling wife; something that George believes isn’t worth thinking too much about. He is trying to be a responsible and dutiful brother now, and if what he needs to do is hold Bill’s hand and spoon feed him Pain Relief Potions while he writhes and aches and cries on his bed, so be it.
It is not, he thinks, as if he has much else to do. Between Charlie’s dragons and Percy’s ambitious Ministry reformation and Ron and Gin’s schooling, he’s the most suitable, most available for filial work. What’s a little business management in the face of regaining normalcy?
Today, though, Percy comes into the shop just after ten, before the crowd comes in.
“George?” he calls.
The boy – man – that emerges from the office in the back isn’t reeking of a gallon of alcohol or unwashed hair. Anymore. These days, George keeps himself prim and neat, not unlike Percy in the height of his career: a combed side-part, pressed shirts, respectable trousers and covered shoes. George Weasley of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes is respectable and presentable and a member of the contributing community, even if what he contributes gets his consumers into trouble with their school teachers.
“Hey Perce,” George says, smiling easily. He’s just sent a letter to Molly, Errol somehow able to fly unsteadily away toward Devon. I’ll be ‘round for dinner, but no need to make a big fuss, Mum. I’m not wanting for attention these days. Molly and Arthur Weasley, sensitive veterans, faithful to a fault and understanding in a way they hadn’t been before the war, will take his words to heart. A small dinner; immediate family and not even Harry Potter and Hermione Granger invited. “What’cha up to?”
“Oh, overthrowing the government, sacking corrupt officials, et cetera, et cetera, the usual,” Percy says lightheartedly. “I brought breakfast.” He holds up a paper bag that smells of bangers and pancakes, as well as a carrier with two cups of piping hot coffee. George grabs for a cup first and inhales his first mouth of caffeine – badly needed, he’s cotton-headed despite his propriety. A night of crying will do that to you.
Percy squints at him critically. “Lookin’ might red in the eyes, Georgie.”
George grimaces tightly, swallows another burning mouthful of coffee and turns around to lead them back to the office. “It’s whatever. Y’not workin’ today, Perce?”
Percy places the bag on the table and slumps into the ergonomic folding chair – stacked with Cushion Charms and a Reclining Charm that George had initially experimented on with Ron. it had been an exciting few weeks of Ron’s chairs falling out the back everytime he sat down, but Molly put a stop to it when his brother had suffered a bruised tailbone.
“Naw,” Percy says around a mouthful of pancake. “M’ get like – what – to set m’ own schedule. Just gotta tell Mira in advance so she knows I’m not comin’ in. Worked seventeen straight days; m’ allowed to take a break.” He chews noisily.
Mira Silversten is Percy’s very zealous and meticulous personal assistant – George doesn’t know her; she’s Finnish and had attended Beauxbatons – and she handles Percy's administrative tasks, while Percy handles the Ministry’s administrative tasks. Being Senior Assistant to the Minister – Kingsley, for all his strengths, is apparently quite a disorganised person – is a title that George cannot really understand. It seems Percy has to do everything; underwriter, paralegal, blah blah blah.
George raises an eyebrow. “This your biannual off-day then?”
“Ha ha,” Percy says. “I’m actually trying t’ be conscientious about overworking. Penelope’s been good for me that way.” Clearwater, Percy’s long-time girlfriend and Hogwarts’ sweetheart. They’d been together before becoming Head Boy and Girl, which George imagines would have been quite the source of ire for the students that year.
How quaint, a then-spiteful George would have thought. The King and Queen of Swots.
“Plus,” Percy continues. “Pen and I are taking a trip to Cairo later in June. Some Rune- related things she wants to see, some events going on. I’m fuzzy on the details.”
“Mhm,” George says, biting off a greasy piece of sausage.
The office is a modest thing. They had rented the first available space right at the beginning, and George had been disinclined to move even after their accumulation of wealth. Potter money through and through the foundations were built on. The storefront takes majority of the space, one and a half floors of customer roaming, the office just a ways through the back, and the attic upstairs full of stock.
The dark-stained teak table is by far the most ostentatious piece of furniture in the entire building. George, more academic than any of the youngest Weasleys, had spent years in envy of the sheesham table Percy got for his coming-of-age, a tiny splurge of Weasley funds for the third Head Boy of the family. They’d budgeted after Harry’s generosity, painstakingly carving out funds for the store, the materials, the stock, the planning, the business, everything, and finally, after all of that, George had taken half the remaining funds and commissioned the first thing that would be only his. A wooden table. A fancy wooden table.
The working poor becomes you, George Weasley, he had thought then. Of course his most prized possession had been something he bought for himself. The same way Bill lines his arms with tattoos, Charlie working menial labour to save up for an apprenticeship in Romania, Percy and his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all only after they had received their paychecks.
Fred and his fleece-lined woolly jackets, silk button-downs, dragon-leather boots, suits created and tailored for him. Vanity became Fred Weasley.
“So you’ve come to spend your day-off with dear old Georgie, huh?” he teases.
“Gotta check in on my favourite brother,” Percy says tonelessly.
“Don’t let Charlie hear that,” George intones, just as severe as Percy. Percy grins down at his coffee. “What’re you reading now, then?”
Percy Weasley, named after Percy Shelley, because his godfather uncle Gideon had been an avid fan of Prometheus Unbound, and when asked, had not found any issue with naming his infant nephew after an exiled, rebelling, defiant Muggle. Of course not. When have the Prewetts ever been conventional, right? But Percy had taken to literature like a duck to water. His apartment’s bookshelves are double-stacked with clothbound copies of Muggle literature and scientific texts. George cannot remember the last time Percy had taken more than a week off from burying his pointed nose into a thick book.
“Hmm,” Percy says now. “I’m almost finished with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Do you know it? I can’t discern whether it’s Muggle or Magical in origin, given it was written about two millennia ago.” Percy, never one to exaggerate needlessly – where someone might have said a million years ago he would specify the date if he thought George would bother to remember it. As it stands, George wouldn’t, unlikely to even remember half the conversation or whatever lecture Percy’s about to give.
His brother the academic, George thinks, not without fondness.
“Did you know Hermione Granger and Pansy Parkinson’s mother are both named after Spartan princesses from the same family?” George racks his brain, shuffling through the million genealogies any good Pureblood should memorise. Molly and Arthur never insisted, but bloodline is bloodline, and it’s helpful anyway to check who he will be able to marry. Iphigenia Parkinson, née Rosier, he believes, is who Percy is referencing.
“Leda has four children with the God Zeus and her husband Tyndareus, King of Sparta,” Percy recites. “Clytemnestra, Helen, Castor, and Polydeuces. Pollux,” he corrects, as if the name means anything to George. “Iphigenia is Clytemnestra’s daughter and Hermione is Helen’s. Castor and Pollux are called twins – the Dioscuri – even though they likely had separate lineages through their fathers.”
Here, Percy bites his lips and frowns. “Not the best topic. Castor dies and Pollux gives half his immortality to him. Immortality offered by Zeus, supposedly his father. The Atreides - Agamemnon and Menelaus, husbands to the girls - were cursed through their bloodlines. But the Dioscuri; they weren't, and all the same Pollux watched his brother die and begged to not be separated from him."
A little ham-handed, this brother of his. The Dioscuri. The Weasley Twins. Monikers, monikers, monikers, ones that live on beyond death. George smiles inwardly, bitterly. “Castor and Pollux,” he muses. “Gemini. I did take astronomy. So how does it work?” he asks, nonchalantly. “Half-immortality. He’s living forever anyway. Old and ugly with wrinkles but still alive?”
Percy scoffs amusedly. “Ha! You fancy yourself quite funny, don’t you?”
“I know I am,” George says, eyes glinting.
“They alternate between Ancient Greek heaven and hell is all,” Percy sighs. “Still young and beautiful.”
“LIke that girl – the devil’s wife,” George says, thinking about the Rape of Proserpina, a marble statue Percy had shown him a picture of a long time ago. A statue that Percy had waxed poetic over.
“The devil – George! I know you know their names,” Percy says, wrinkling his nose. George just grins snidely.
They finish their bangers and pancakes and coffees, and George spares a second to look at the spot of grease staining his table – the one he still cleans fortnightly, more than a few years into its life. He conjures a piece of tissue paper and wipes it away. Wouldn’t do to have stains on his desk now, would it?
Percy chews, swallows, and finally brings up what George has been trying to put off.
“Twenty-one, Georgie,” he says mildly. “How’s it feel?”
“No different,” George says, looking away and tapping a beat on his thigh. “Just another day, another year, no wife, no grandchildren for mum.” He crosses his legs, one over the other, then uncrosses them, then recrosses them.
“I’m sure she’s sobbing with disappointment,” Percy says drily. “Another month away from disowning you. It’s not as if you have two older brothers ahead of you with no children as well.” He shifts, the chair squeaking slightly under him. “It’s the first year though, Georgie,” and George feels the dread pooling in his gut. “You ok?”
George glances up at the clock that hangs on the wall behind Percy. “One full hour, Perce, before you couldn’t resist. I’m proud of you,” he says lightly.
“George,” Percy frowns.
“Perce,” George parrots. “I’m fine.” He stands and turns to the cabinet behind him, unlocking it with a wandless wave of his hand. “Drink? I know what you want to talk about, my personal therapist, but I shan’t be getting through it sober.”
Percy disapprovingly hmms. “Butterbeer is fine, George,” he says quietly.
A sweating bottle of Butterbeer is set down before Percy, and George pulls a Firewhiskey from the shelf and a shot glass, and sits heavily down back in his chair, hands shaking. He immediately throws back a shot before Percy even touches the mouth of the bottle to his lips..
“Ronnie came by last week to check on me already,” George says. “Says Gin couldn’t, on account of her being a Prefect and Captain of the Gryffindor team. But our brother had a letter to excuse himself, too, signed and stamped by the Headmistress. A right goody-two-shoes now, our Ronnie. Seems like his girlfriend’s good for him, huh?” He laughs to himself. Percy’s lips twitch upward.
“And how did he find you?”
“Stinking drunk in a puddle of my own piss, Perce. But I’m not sure what you could have expected. Not my finest moment, for sure, but then I didn’t think there was any other way he could have found me. I had a hangover for days and a humiliation to rival all my years of tomfoolery. It’s not very becoming for my younger brother to see me like that, right?” George chuckles deprecatingly.
“How are you feeling now?”
“Are you sure you aren’t a licensed practitioner? Some kind of mental health advocate? Because you sound like it, Perce. I’m really okay, you know. Of course I’m sad, of course I don’t really know what to do with myself on a birthday I haven’t spent alone ever.” He shrugs. “I’m honest. It’s bad and if I had a do-over I wouldn’t choose this for myself. But what’s done is done. I’m surviving. Thus far, I don’t think that’s too little to expect of myself.”
Percy looks understanding and empathetic, but not piteous. George is unspeakably grateful for that.
“We shared everything, Fred and I. Now there’s nothing to share, except flowers on a grave and our names on patents. It’s –” he struggles to find words for it. “It’s frustrating and lonely. I think there’s a kind of intertwinement in magical cores for twins – especially identical ones like us, and I’m not trying to be sappy, but when he passed I genuinely felt like something had torn from me.” He shrugs. “You remember when I was lashing out and magically unstable right?” Percy nods. “Something like that. I had to recalibrate for a single magical core. Grief took me like a paper torn apart.”
“It wasn’t a coincidence your wands were nearly identical,” Percy says softly.
“No, exactly,” George echoes. “He was half of me, and now I am half a man.”
He’s halfway through the bottle, and Percy has only taken a few sips of his Butterbeer.
“Pollux got lucky that way,” he says, pushing his finger through a puddle of condensation on the table. “I’d give my life to choose immortality for Fred. I’d do anything for a second life with him.”
“Georgie,” Percy says quietly. George smiles wanly and shakes his head.
“It is what it is. How lucky mum had seven of us, so I can make up for Fred with five other siblings,” he says bitterly, then flushes red, guilty. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“I think you did,” Percy says. “But it’s really okay. None of us are Fred. I –” Percy visibly looks for a way to phrase his next sentence tactfully, pupils shaking. “I can’t imagine… what it’s like,” he says stiltedly. “To be like this. To be a twin and then not a twin.”
“No, you couldn’t,” George says, and it isn’t accusatory. The fact of the matter is such.
“I wish Fred was here,” they are silent, and George says this simply to fill it. The magnitude of his words is great. I wish, when nothing can grant him that wish. I wish, as if it were so simple, like a child asking for a toy from George’s shop. I want this, mummy, I wish for it badly. Mummy, I want it.
I wish, mummy, George thinks now, I want him back.
“Pollux said, ‘grant that I too with my brother may die, great king, I beg thee.’ I wonder if given the chance, you would have laid down to be shrouded in death with Fred,” Percy says, not unkindly, not cruelly, but direct and honest the way only Percy can be. “Cheers,” he lifts his Butterbeer up.
“Alright, then, fuck you too,” George chokes, laughing, eyes wet with tears, clinking his empty shot glass.