A/N: Was anyone else torn apart by the last movie installment of the HP series? Although not perfect, it has rekindled my love for writing fanfiction. I wrote this in about thirty minutes and it's extremely rough, but hey; that's how all my stuff is. This fic was written along "If I Die Young" by The Band Perry. If you're looking for something to accompany it, that is.

In That Moment
A George Fanfiction
July 18, 2011

In that moment, I could not breathe.

I could not move past the brief second in time in which every atom of my body changed.

Despite the flashes of light and color and the battle raging around me as if nothing changed, I staggered forward a few steps, clutching my chest and gasping for air.

In that moment, I knew what happened.

I knew what happened like I knew what his next word would be. I knew what happened like I knew which idea of his would work and which wouldn't. I knew what happened like I knew what the next prank would be, like I knew where the bludger was going to be.

In that moment, I knew what happened like I knew him.

It was a most interesting and curious sensation. Painful, the worst pain I'd ever experienced, but there was more to it. More layers, a different texture, something more than just pain. It was as if I knew I would never really know his smile again, never really remember his laughter because it would just be an empty echo, an empty fragment of my memory, left to sit in my brain and grow stale…

In that moment, the battle lost all importance. My mind changed pace and I lost focus; all I knew was I had to find him and put us back together again. We'd fallen off the wall and broken apart, humpty dumpty fell all the way down and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put humpty dumpty back together again… The strange muggle nursery rhyme repeated itself over and over in my head as I ran blindly, tugged along as if by a chain by the emptiness that suddenly consumed my internal organs, as if I were only a shell and the very essence of me was pulling me somewhere, if I could only find this somewhere….

The building was shaking around me; there were screams of men, women, children; fighters too young to see what we were all seeing. In the legends they tell now they forget that in those moments were all children, we were children fighting to save the world from what it could become. But I stumbled past their pain and their terror, all consumed with mine and in that moment I was so selfish. There were people I could have saved; there were lives that perhaps would have been spared if I sent a well-aimed jinx in the direction of a masked malcontent. But instead I kept running, calling desperately for the life I could not save, the life I had been too far away to save when he fell…

There were bodies around me as I ran further away from Hogwarts' insides; he had been on the front lines and I was working to save the interior. We had, in our foolishness and invincibility, believed ourselves to be immortal, believed that we could easily survive apart from each other because we could not die. We were the Weasley twins, brilliant and freckled and handsome and wealthy, entrepreneurs before the age of 25 and a walking defiance of everything our teachers told us. We would be something, we were something, together we were unstoppable, but in that moment, and all the moments after that, I felt so vulnerable, so alone, so utterly breakable…

I slipped on blood as I skidded around a corner. It was everywhere, shining red and real and dangerous in the cruel starlight of a beautiful May night. We would all remember this night, this night as the night everything changed for the better for the Wizarding world. Our enemy would be vanquished, he would be brought down by the one and only Harry Potter, that all important Chosen One we all claimed to fight for. But in reality, we were fighting for ourselves, our families, the people we had lost and would lose to the overwhelming evil that wracked the castle. In the back of everyone's mind was the question 'why, why, why'; why was Tom Riddle like this; what led him to this; could we have stopped him earlier? But nobody wanted to vocalize their doubts and suspicions that the greatest evil the Wizarding world had ever seen had been our fault, and those who were falling all around us were our penance, our crosses to bear for the rest of our existences…

The black hole in my chest grew stronger; I knew I was close. He could not be far; he would not be far; he would be near and I would hold him and he would be alive and I would, in that first moment, have been wrong. It would have been irrational fear and we would go on fighting together, and I would tell him later that I had, for once, gotten him wrong; maybe we didn't have each other entirely figured out. But I knew we did, I knew Fred like I knew George, we were so interchangeable: one soul, two bodies, why would any God be so cruel as to separate one and take away his other half?

I felt him behind the tapestry before I saw his trainer, grimy with blood, several feet away. My breaths, already gasping, quickened, reminding me in the most torturous fashion that I was using air that he deserved to breathe, that he should be breathing and sharing with me, but for some reason wasn't, and I couldn't understand why not. My voice came out quiet and steady, unlike my thoughts, as I uttered his name, over and over and over and over and over….

And I saw his face, staring into the starry sky without seeing, and it was my face, and in that moment I saw what I would forever look like.