Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling earns her credit. This is hers, scene manipulation is mine.

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Turntable. 1/1

His face is shadowed by the smoulder, a mere silhouette of glowing after burn. A ring of smoke curls toward the elusive heavens and the secret flare of embers sparkle on the end of a delicate cigarette: it is a dangerous star congesting the illusion of a peaceful night. Stumpy fingers choke its length and crush the toxic nicotine in a merciless, shaking grip. Another drag to cracked lips, an amateur's cough, the acrid poison ripping his throat and cutting the air, smelling of burning steppes. The world seems on fire—

Memory: nightmare: dream: deep, dark red hair; brown open eyes; ashen grey smile ghosted across faded lips; himself dead across a table. The end of Gred and—

He lurches forward in a dry heave and hurls the offending drug to the pebbled ground, holding onto his contorted face with spread, dirty hands, gasping into them, eyes clenched tight against the memories, tortured mind begging release. His heart is just a mechanical contraption beating out of duty rather than passion, hanging by a thread inside the hollow body of a rusting tin soldier.

The park bench is hard against his concave back, himself a shadow illuminated only by the weak, fleeting light of stars missing their companion that should shine lunar blue. His shuddering intake of toxic life, still curling blue-grey in the air, erupts in silence. A large oak overhangs him, its arm hovering over his wilted shoulders in perpetual hesitation, its message of condolence stifled by the whisper of its leaves spiralling in the wind, like the lethargy of a hot summer's humidity and the echo of the slap of skin on skin. He moves his stiff arms to grip his knees and stares at the ground with eyes unseeing, the bitter resentment of life plaguing his thoughts.

Then: voices of strangers and friends, behind him, to the left. The voices come through the lamplight and set their hungry, searching eyes on his huddled form and that cigarette burning in the shallow sea of tiny stones. Choking, he is choking on acrid smoke and the impending milieu.

He rises only to stumble and hear worried tones in his single ear and hears their rising recognition of his escape and he almost manages to miss the desperate cry of George!

But he escapes their clutches once more and turns on the spot, cloak swishing around his aching legs, to apparate singular.

The cigarette peters out.

-x-x-x-

A neighbourhood he has only been to once is where he lands on unsteady feet. Red hair too long twists around his face, clawing pale cheeks like taloned fingers. Chin dotted with rusty stubble, arms hugging himself in the wind, his cloak embracing him, brown eyes like burnt coffee stare empty.

Grief personified.

The street is long and the house is lost and his soft footfalls irregular. He walks until he sees her in blinding, golden light, messy, bushy hair pushed away with a headband, legs curled under her as she reads through midnight in an armchair with her lips pulled between her teeth and her eyes drinking in each word like expensive wine. George steps toward the window, looking through those half closed curtains at the girl who may be his, until he is so close he raises a hand to place it on the glass, the barest hairsbreadth from her profile. His hand is cold and drained of blood, prickling like a curse, before she closes the book and smiles down at it in self-assured contentment. George's breath is a mist against the window and just as she is about to look up and see a ghost, he steps out of sight, counting left, then counting right, and stands on her doorstep.

Hours pass.

His mechanical heart beats but his face is pale and his limbs are sore and when he finally raises his aching hand to thud it uselessly against the door he hits it twice and thinks of—

He gasps a choking breath, a lurch against the door, too frozen to wail. Whilst he stares at the ground, the ground is suddenly lighter and the golden light is tainted with a shadow. A small gasp, a sigh: George… and suddenly there is salt on his blue lips and tear tracks on his freckled cheeks and he is falling to bury himself in the mess of her hair and to smell her scent without the acrid smoke invading his nostrils or the smell of his other half overpowering every crevice of his flat. She does not tell him it will be alright or ask him how he is and he stops running from his pain to push her against the wall of her small flat and sob into her shoulder, to listen to her comforting croons.

And, most of all, she does not tell him she knows how he feels because that is what is killing him because no one knows how he feels and no one can make it better and he just can not bear to hear them say it.

He brings his lips to hers and burns her mouth in a searing kiss and, where her hands were stroking his head like a parent to comfort a child, the fingers are now fisting his shaggy hair in the desperate hold of an unrequited love. Hermione's back arches with his panicked embrace. He drops his lips to her neck and cries again.

Then his voice, his very own voice, cracked with disuse, is saying, I can't breathe. I can't breathe against her neck and those cryptic words are accidental kisses. He moves the words to her mouth and bruises her with fire, burning her lips, her flaming cheeks ember red. He kisses her with a hand against her neck and another twisted in her infinite hair. George forces her further against that wall and his arms move to hold Hermione tight enough to choke her like that cigarette from a millennium ago. He breaks from the anxious kiss, rests his forehead against hers and closes his eyes so he does not have to look into those deep, chocolate eyes.

George thinks of saying, Come away with me and tugging her hand from her world, bringing this light with him to stop him executing his plans. Somehow, she tastes like oxygen, finite oxygen that may be the key. The silence is broken: not those words, but the other words are brushing against her quivering mouth in poignant repetition and his tears are streaming his plea across her cheeks until Hermione is sobbing too and, no matter how hard he tries, his husky voice will not stop. Suddenly the truth of the duet of tears seizes his throat and he has to stop because this is a duo, this is connectedness and this will make him miss himself all the more.

He wretches his head away from her with one last bruising kiss to taste her salt for the last time and he forces his cold body from her warm hold and spins out into the unforgiving night air with his unbidden tears a memory's trail behind him. That voice, that soft sigh, is still in his head and pushing through the air: George! George, come back! He runs, he sprints as fast as he can from her pleas, his feet pounding against the labyrinth of the pavement, his voice still crying, I can't breathe under non-existent oxygen.

He runs from golden light. Desperation personified.

George apparates with an uncharacteristically loud crack of broken air to suddenly find his feet are stumbling toward somewhere he vowed never to tread near. He falls to his knees and stares at that fresh dirt of the grave that holds himself captive, horribly real in his blurry vision. His brother, his twin, his everything, lying metres below him, unable to breathe alone either. He is suddenly still: cold, warm and neutral.

The whispering recommences and he clutches his cloak in one hand and the whisper is the fatal syllables of the cutting hex, and suddenly his chest is bleeding, suddenly his frozen body is warm and he is shaking uncontrollably and he is so pale his freckles are dots of memories that are flying through his brain rather than regrets. Of fighting, anxiety, love, distance, closeness, laughter, glowering, their first drink, their bets, their hopes and their dreams. His shaking hand reaches into his bloody cloak to extract the miniature pensieve he stole from a junk shop in Diagon Alley and his wand is on his temple to retrieve a random memory. The memory is silver light, shimmering like the moon that should have been in the night sky above, like the stream of tears that glisten on his face and pour from his eyes, like the light in the twinkling, mirth-filled eyes in his head. He adds the memory to the basin in the pensieve and touches it with a quivering finger, dripping with freshly spilled blood, and he is cold and alone and falling through oblivion…

Memory: dream: heart-swelling ache: The day the twins finally bought the shop in Diagon Alley they set it up to shine with every shocking colour they could think of, proudly wearing their magenta robes that clashed so beautifully with their hair. Then they stepped back to lean against the counter and admire it with Butterbeers in their hands and comfortable silence between them, dreaming up products, congratulating each other with small chuckles. Then Fred was tugging on his sleeve until George turned around and he threw himself at him, like an excited child, jumping into his arms and shouting, We did it, George! We did it! at the top of his voice and George was smiling and yelling, We did it, Fred! too, and they were both embracing unashamed and George was laughing...

… and George is laughing and the blood pours out of his chest faster with each aching, hysterical sob of relief and mirth, but he is crying, and he is laughing and his last breath is a laugh and his last movement a wicked grin, the light he searched for fading from his eyes. He dies the day after his brother, the one difference that can never be erased.

In death, the hole in his chest is filled when George sees Fred again and, somehow, he breathes, solaced: Twinship personified.

Fin

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Comments are appreciated. Thank you for reading.

-AA-