Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.

A/N: Well, I've been in a Weasley mood for the past few days, and this is what I came up with. I'm a little unsure about how it turned out, but it was fun to write. I hope you enjoy it!

An Imperfect World

Molly is a day away from giving birth when they tell her that her brothers are dead. It is all a blur of hurt and confusion, but later she will remember the horror and the disbelief, the way the pain seems almost physical and then it is. She will remember smiling through her tears when they place her baby boys in her arms, and she meets their bright brown eyes and is sure that they are her brothers reincarnate.

Fred Gideon and George Fabian, she calls them, and maybe she is a little overprotective of them; but they are Gideon and Fabian born again and can you really blame her?

They are too similar.

Gideon was older by a year and a day, and it showed in the fierce way he protected his little brother. Nobody harmed a hair on Fabian's head. Ever. Molly can see this happening again – she reaches for a crying George but his twin's arm is already around him; he buries his head in Fred's shoulder and quietens down. Fred meets her gaze, all fierce and defiant and someone else, and when she tells him to sleep she accidentally calls him Gideon.

He blinks at her, but says nothing. She leaves their room, sits in the hallway and cries for a moment, cries for the brothers who died too young: and she knows that she can never let anyone harm the twins, because they are a chance to fix what she could not.

Poor Molly – she is still young and sweet, and she does not know that in their imperfect world there is no such thing as a second chance.

They grow, as all children are apt to do. Sometimes Molly still calls them by her brothers' names, but as the twins develop their own personalities she sees that they are not quite Gideon and Fabian Prewett, but rather Fred and George Weasley.

The question is: is that a bad thing?

Ginny does not need to be told that her brother is dead. She does not need to be told, because she sees him. She screams and sobs and begs, but he is gone where he cannot hear her.

So Ginny becomes quiet. She looks up to see George kneeling at his twin's head and knows that she will not let him fall. He is George Weasley, not Fabian Prewett. He will survive, because Ginny won't have it any other way.

Molly does not know which of her brothers died first.

She wonders why she never thought of this before. She wonders why in her head, they always fell together. They were Gideon and Fabian Prewett, after all, and they were inseparable.

So were Fred and George Weasley. At least, that is what she thought.

She wonders if the last one standing screamed. She wonders if he called his brother's name over and over again. She wonders if he leapt to his feet in a murderous rage, or if he smiled as they killed him. She wonders if it was Gideon, fiercely protective and passionate; or Fabian, kinder and gentler, Fabian who loved his brother too much.

When she tries to imagine the scene (because the old pain is a thousand times better than the new one), all she can see is broken brown eyes and a white hand, and all she can hear is George's voice. It is terrified and shattered and only half-there; because in her head, in everyone's head, the twins always fell together.

It is part of who they are.

Ginny is selfish.

Let him go, the voice in her head is saying. Let him leave. Let him be happy again. But Ginny is not strong. She is not her mother, who had both brothers die. She will cling to George, keep him as long as she can, because isn't losing one of them enough?

The worst thing is that he listens. He meets her pleading brown eyes, sees her desperate face and stays for her. He pulls himself back from the brink of falling, tries so hard not to let himself shatter – and he will never be truly happy again, but he keeps himself from dying because he loves her. Ginny is glad of it: but she knows the weight of his sacrifice.

For theirs is an imperfect world, and Ginny loves him too much to let him leave it.

Healing is a vague word.

He's broken – shattered, they said, the first few months after the war. After that: he's improving. A little. Now, a year and a half after Fred's death, they have reached healing – he's healing, slow and steady. He's getting better. He'll be okay.

They are meaningless words meant to comfort the speaker, Ginny thinks, because maybe George is getting better but he'll never be okay. And maybe he is healing but he will never reach the stage of 'healed'. This is not the sort of loss that can ever quite be mended.

This is not the sort of story to have a happy ending: not in this imperfect world.

In a perfect world, Ginny would hold her son in her arms and think Fred. In a perfect world, it would all be a reflection of what happened with her mother twenty-seven years ago, when she looked at her baby boys and saw the brothers she had lost.

But the child is not her brother. Sure, he has Fred's brown eyes: but he has his father's black hair and his grandfather's laugh. Really, James Potter is the only name that fits him.

She wants him to be a Weasley. But doesn't poor Harry deserve a chance to honour the father he lost too long ago?

It is not quite a reincarnation.

Perhaps they are a duo of pranksters, James and his cousin Fred; maybe their eyes are brilliant brown and perhaps sometimes they laugh as one, but they are their own people and they cannot be weighed down with ghosts. Ginny knows this, as does George. Every now and then she meets her brother's eyes and the smile they share is bittersweet, but they are not so foolish as to hope.

If nothing else, war is good at making people realists.

Ginny calls her son Fred exactly once.

It is a day when Albus is ill and Lily is worrying, and she comes running to her big brother for comfort. James picks her up and swings her round and round until the tears are mixed with laughter, and from her place by Albus's bed Ginny feels an inexplicable stab of jealousy.

She does not try to identify the feeling – for how do you justify envying your daughter for having what you lost? – but her voice is a little sharper than normal when she tells Fred to put his sister down.

Except that it is not Fred but James, and he looks at her with curious brown eyes that sparkle with defiance; and just for that moment he is someone else, and Ginny cannot tell him that the last person who ever picked her up like that was the uncle he has never met.

Fred is gone, and Ginny can't afford to let his memory hurt her.

They are not similar enough.

Ginny watches as her son and nephew sit in a corner of The Burrow's living room, whispering with the energetic fervour of teenage boys. But it is not joke shops they talk about but Quidditch and professors, and somehow every single difference is a reminder of what she lost and how she cannot have it back again.

She does not see her mother watching, and the hope in her eyes mirrors what Ginny and George looked like years ago. She wants the boys to be Fred&George Weasley, or maybe even Gideon&Fabian Prewett, but they aren't. Ginny knows what her mother didn't: in this imperfect world, there are no second chances.

So, yes, maybe the cousins wear the eyes of too many brothers lost. But they are different. They are not ghosts or reincarnations, but James Potter and Fred Weasley. It is not their fault that they are similar but not similar enough, or that their parents are unable to forget age-old scars. Ginny does not blame them.

They do not have the brotherly love of the Prewetts, nor the perfect unity of the Weasleys. But Ginny will take what she can get.

Theirs, after all, is an imperfect world.

A/N: Please tell me what you thought in a review!

~Butterfly