Myths and Match
So many things will never be done again, George sometimes thinks to himself.
He'll never again pull a prank with his laughing double, never again make mischief and crack jokes with his grinning partner in crime. There will be no more finishing one another's sentences and speaking in turn, and no more wandering the halls past curfew, simply marvelling at the phenomenon of having someone with him, someone who essentially is him but also completely different, someone who just gets him before he even gets himself.
Sometimes he looks at new pictures and feels like someone's cut a vital part out with scissors and replaced the missing piece with a spell, because there's an empty spot beside him that used to be filled.
Sometimes he sees himself in the mirror and gasps, before abruptly wishing he hadn't, because the face gasps right back and it's not mockingly, it's just really his face in the reflection, the mirror doing its job like a slap to the face.
Sometimes he'll pause in the middle of a sentence waiting for someone else to finish it, before realizing that it's never going to happen, and that everyone is waiting for him to finish with a pitying expression on their faces.
Sometimes he has to smile to himself because he knows that that's the closest he's going to get.
It's a myth that twins feel one another's pain, and he's thankful for that, because wherever Fred is, he doesn't want him to be hurting like he is ever since he looked down and saw his own lifeless eyes staring up at him, and realized that it all was over, all of it, everything he cared about in the world, over and gone like a dream he'd been woken up from.
But sometimes he also wishes it was true, because he wishes he could have least felt his brother leaving, and have been there to say goodbye, because it's hard living with a ghost of things never to be done again following your every footstep.