Fred’s family had never approved of you. You weren’t a Slytherin, and your family wasn’t running in Voldemort’s circles. You weren’t disrespectful and you weren’t a bad influence. But you were different. Born with a darker, archaic magic flowing through your veins. A power that scared them. You had the ability to manipulate death itself, whether that was inflicting or reversing. It wasn’t a power you used often, and you had never used it on a person. Until you had to.
Warnings: character death, old age, dark magic
You met Fred Weasley for the first time in the Room of Requirement.
Not in a dreamy, romantic way. More like a quick introduction before being partnered to duel. There was urgency in the air that year. Whispers of war tightening around every corridor, and you’d joined Dumbledore’s Army out of quiet desperation. You needed to fight. You needed to be ready for what was coming. Umbridge certainly wasn’t preparing you.
Fred found you amusing. Not because you were funny - though, sometimes, you managed to be. No, it was the way you stood at the back of the room, arms folded, dark magic flickering faintly at your fingertips like it wanted to be set free. You never laughed at his jokes, never flinched at a spell. You were mystery cloaked in sarcasm, and Fred had never been one to resist a puzzle.
He didn’t flirt with you at first. He challenged you. “You always scowl like that, or is this your way of intimidating the Death Eaters before you hex them into next week?”
You didn’t even blink. “I’ll hex you into next week if you keep talking.”
He’d laughed then, and for the first time, you found yourself smiling back. And so had started a partnership of sorts. He helped you with spells, you helped him with school work. He never cared about the strange archaic magic that you’d been born with. He didn’t shy away from you in fear like the others, or assume that you were a dark witch in the making. He simply accepted your gift - or curse, however one should see it - as part of you.
The night of the battle in the Department of Mysteries, you should have died. You’d been with Luna when the others gathered to save Sirius, and as a member of the DA, you’d gone with them. This was what you’d been learning to fight for.
When you arrived it had been an ambush. You were cornered in the strange room with the veiled arch, your wand knocked from your hand, Bellatrix Lestrange circling you like a vulture.
“I know your kind,” she’d whispered. “Those who speak to bones. Pretending it’s not dark, pretending it’s not evil. You’ll be one of us soon.”
Bellatrix had raised her wand. And then, Fred Weasley barreled into her like a red-headed bat out of hell.“Oi! Ugly! Leave my girl alone!”
The impact knocked her to the ground, giving you the second you needed to dive for your wand and cast a stunning spell that made even Mad-Eye Moody blink.
You both fled and slid to hide behind a large rocky wall with Tonks, your hands bloodied, your hearts thundering. The moment you were out of firing range, he turned to you, hair wild, eyes on fire.
You were shaking. A little out of breath. But you managed, “You called me your girl.”
He had the audacity to grin. “Well, are you?”
You didn’t answer him then. You didn’t need to. Your heart already belonged to him.
He didn’t come back to Hogwarts the next year- not for school. But you found him there all the time anyway. Sneaking in through secret tunnels from Hogsmeade, ‘visiting his siblings’, he’d said.
Yet every time, his first stop had been you. He’d find you in the library, or perched on the astronomy tower with a book on runes, and with that crooked smile of his, he’d sit beside you like he belonged there.
Because he did. You could feel it. Fred Weasley belonged in your orbit, as much as your magic or your pulse or your name.
It hadn’t taken him long to ask you out properly. A clumsy picnic on the edge of the Black Lake. He brought a blanket, a basket of Honeydukes sweets, and a small charmed bouquet of flowers that wiggled when you looked too serious.
You tried not to fall for him too fast. You failed miserably.
By the time he invited you to Bill and Fleur’s wedding, things had gotten serious between the two do you.
You’d spent weeks preparing, your nerves spiraling like cursed smoke. You wore a soft lilac dress and pulled your hair back just the way he liked it. Fred couldn’t take his eyes off you all night.
“This is nothing,” he’d whispered, holding your hand beneath the table during dinner. “They’ll love you. How could they not?”
But they didn’t. Not all of them.
Molly, in particular, eyed you like you were made of glass shards and hidden traps. She didn’t say much, but the silence spoke volumes. Arthur had tried to be kind, but Ginny asked questions you weren’t ready to answer, and Ron made some joke about death eaters and death magic that stung more than you let on.
They’d heard things. Whispers about the kind of magic you’d been born into. About what you could do. About the darkness that clung to you, whether you wanted it or not.
When you left the reception early, your heart a heavy ache, Fred had followed without a word. He apparated you both to a quiet field somewhere in the country. Just starlight and crickets and him.
You sat in the grass with your knees pulled to your chest, feeling like a child again. Broken. Wrong. “They hate me,” you said flatly.
“They don’t know you,” he replied.
You looked at him then. His hair a mess, his eyes softer than they should’ve been, his mouth pressed into that rare line he only wore when something truly mattered.
“They think I’m evil, Fred.”
And he’d pulled you into his chest, wrapped you in his arms, and whispered, “If they knew the girl who reads aloud to ghosts who can no longer hold books and cries over wounded birds, they’d adore you. But I do. And that’s enough for now.”
When you’d returned to the reception everything was on fire. Death eaters crawled all over the place, spells flying like colourful fireworks in the air. The ministry had fallen.
You and Fred went into hiding not long after the ashes had cleared in Weasley’s backyard. George was with you. As was Lee Jordan, and even Remus Lupin for a time. You moved from safehouse to safehouse, camping out in the forest in between. Always one step ahead. He invented protective charms on the fly. You enchanted bones into warding stones. Fred made you laugh in dusty attics and held you when you woke up screaming from dreams of blood.
He never questioned your power. He never feared you. He called you his girl like it was a fact of the universe. And together, you survived.
Until today. The world was burning again. Hogwarts was fighting. Falling. Failing.
You didn’t remember running. Only that one moment, you’d been dueling a Death Eater in one of Hogwarts’s crumbling towers, and the next you were falling. Your knees buckled beneath the weight of a scream.
“Fred!” It cracked out of you like a curse. Like a death sentence.
You found him under rubble, skin ghostly pale, hair matted with blood, his chest still. So still. His wand lay not far from him, snapped in two.
You didn’t think. Didn’t check. You just dropped to your knees beside him, grabbing his face in your hands, ignoring the blood, the cracked skull, the stillness.
“No. No. No, no, no—” You wouldn’t let him go. Not like this. Not now.
And so you did the thing you had always sworn not to do. The thing that made Molly call you an abomination. The thing that made wizards mutter behind your back. The thing that got necromancers burned in the stories and banished in real life.
You reached for the boundary between death and life, and crossed it.
Your magic flickered like oil on water, black and brilliant. The world around you dimmed. The battle faded. You pressed your hands to his sternum and whispered the words that had never dared pass your lips.
“I offer my breath to follow yours. I give my soul to call yours back. Between this world and the next, I will find you, Frederick Gideon Weasley. Come back to me.”
And then everything went dark.
You floated. Weightless. For a moment, there was no direction. No sky. No ground. Just…grey. An endless, humming grey.
Your body wasn’t your body anymore. You had form, but no flesh. Movement, but no mass. Your thoughts echoed in your own skull like a thousand overlapping voices. Some were your own. Some were not.
“Fred.” You called his name and it echoed endlessly throughout the cavernous space.
A light appeared far away. Faint. Like a flickering candle in a hall of mirrors. You turned to face it slowly. Shapes emerged in the mist. Not people. Not demons. Walls.
The sudden structure of a hallway stretched on forever. Wooden doors lined both sides, old and splintered, their brass nameplates shimmering with strange inscriptions. None in a language you recognised. The walls bled with shadow, leaking old whispers. You took a step forward and the door beside you burst open with a slam.
You jumped. Inside…was you.
You stood in the corridor’s doorway, looking in. Inside was a version of your life where you had never met Fred Weasley.
You sat in the library, alone. Ate in the Great Hall, alone. Watched as he and George pulled pranks across the room. You smiled sometimes. Laughed even. But it was shallow. There was no gravity to your life. No anchor. No one who knew you.
You blinked, and another door swung open. Another you.
This time, you met him - but he never looked at you twice. He dated someone else. You passed him in the halls. He smiled, but it was polite. Hollow. Your heart broke silently in that life, and you said nothing.
Each one contained a version of your life where he was just out of reach. A friend. A stranger. A ghost.
In one, he died before you could ever speak. In another, you were the one who died, and he visited your grave every week with violets tucked in his jacket.
Each life felt like a wound you had to live through. You experienced every ache. Every slow burn of longing. Every version of yourself that never knew what it was to be loved by Fred. It only made the thought of a future without him all the more unbearable.
Your knees buckled. You screamed. You begged the hallway to stop showing you these lives. You pounded your fists against the walls, but the doors kept swinging open.
“I choose him,” you whispered. Nothing changed. “I choose Fred Weasley. Every time. I don’t want a life without him.”
The doors slowly closed. One by one. Until there was only silence. Until the hallway became mist again, and the path opened forward.
You stepped through the fog and into a moonlit field. The stars above you were unfamiliar. Foreign constellations hung heavy in the sky. At the far end stood a crumbling mausoleum, more foreign words carved into its stone.
And in the grass before you were graves. Hundreds of them. Thousands. An endless field. You recognised some of the names. People you had known. People you had failed. The wind whispered your name, but it didn’t come from the sky. It came from below.
You turned and saw them. The dead. Not just corpses. Ghosts.
A little girl you’d tried to save in the battle at Hogwarts. Fenrir Greyback had gotten there faster.
Your childhood friend who had died from a sickness that plagued her bloodline.
A fellow student from DA, killed by a snatcher during one of the early raids.
Your father, taken from you when you were young.
Each one stared at you, their eyes hollow with pain.
“Why do you get to live?” one of them asked.
“Why does he get to come back?”
“Do you think your love is more important than ours?”
They circled you slowly, dragging behind them echoes of your guilt.
“You tamper with things you don’t understand,” your father said.
“You’ve never stopped running from what you are.”
“I’m not running,” you whispered, trembling. “I’m fighting.”
“You’re fighting to take, not to give,” the little girl snapped. “You take him back from us, and you’ll pay the price.”
They paused. The wind stopped.
You stepped forward, heart shaking in your chest. “I know I’m playing with death. I know I’m breaking every rule. But I don’t care. I love him. And if that’s selfish, if that’s a crime, then I’ll pay it. I’ll pay it in blood. I’ll pay it in years. I’ll pay it with my soul. Just let me reach him.”
The ghosts stared. And then, they bowed their heads. The wind blew through the graveyard again, and the mausoleum cracked open, revealing a staircase that spiraled into golden mist.
You didn’t hesitate. You climbed.
At the top of the stairs, the world went silent again. You stood alone in a glass room. Floating in the grey. The walls were mirrors. All of them. And every one of them showed Fred.
But not the Fred you knew. Not the one who called you “love” with laughter in his mouth. These Freds were cold. Angry. Afraid.
In one mirror, he looked at you with disgust. “You brought me back for this? For a life chained to someone the world hates?”
In another, he screamed at you. “You stole my peace! I was happy where I was!”
In the third…he didn’t speak at all. He just turned and walked away.
You stumbled back, hands shaking, stomach turning. You couldn’t breathe. What if this was real? What if…when you reached him…he hated you for it? What if you brought him back to suffering?
You pressed your palms to the mirror. Your reflection met you, but its eyes weren’t yours. They were hollow. Afraid. Full of doubt.
“Would you rather he be gone?” you whispered. “Would that be better?”
The silence answered. You grit your teeth and slammed your fist against the glass. It cracked.“I would rather have him hate me than lose him completely.”
“I would rather walk into fire than let him go.”
“I love him. And that love is real, and it’s mine.”
With a final scream, you threw yourself into the mirror, and it shattered like starlight around you. The grey faded. There, standing at the edge of a great stone platform was Fred.
Your Fred. He looked like himself. No blood. No bruises. Just Fred. Sitting with his legs dangling off the edge, like he was watching the clouds roll past.
When he turned, his eyes widened. “…You?”
You ran to him. Collapsed to your knees before him. Grabbed his face between your shaking hands. “I found you,” you choked out.
He blinked. “You always were a bit dramatic, weren’t you?”
You laughed through tears. “Come home,” you whispered. “Please, Fred. Come back.”
He reached for you. And the moment his hand touched yours, you collapsed.
The first thing you felt was pressure. Not pain. Not exactly. But a crushing, aching weight in your chest, like someone had sewn lead into your ribs.
Then came the beeping. Harsh. Rhythmic. Artificial. The world around you was white. Too white. The ceiling above your eyes was blinding, sterile, and still buzzing faintly with old magic.
You weren’t dead. That was the first thing you knew for sure. You weren’t dead, but you weren’t sure if you were alive either. Not in the way that mattered.
You tried to sit up. Tubes tugged at your arms. Cold bindings wrapped around your wrists. Your legs felt like they were underwater.
Then came the remembering. Fred. Stone. Blood. His body, so still beneath your hands. The spell. The trials. His voice. His face. His hand in yours.
Your eyes flew open. “FRED!” Your scream tore through the silence like glass breaking.
The room erupted. Healers burst in from the hallway, wands raised, their faces quickly shifting from surprise to alarm as your magic lashed out in a pulse of instinctual fear. You didn’t know what you were doing - you just needed to move, needed to find him, see him, know he was there.
“Miss, you need to remain still—”
“No! No, where is he…where’s Fred? Where is he?” You were already ripping at the cords in your arms, sending potions and wires crashing to the floor. A monitor sparked from magical feedback and you flung it across the room with a blast of raw energy that made the wall crack.
Two of them advanced, and your body went rigid, every nerve firing at once. The air around you grew thick with shadows, magic gathering in your palms like smoke caught in wind.
They flinched. You didn’t care. You would burn this whole place down if they didn’t tell you right now whether or not he was alive.
Then the door slammed open again. A blur of red hair. A familiar voice shouting, “Let me through! Let me through!”
You turned toward it, heart stopping in your chest. “Fred?”
But it wasn’t him. It was George. Bruised. Bloodied. His shirt half untucked, ear missing, a bandage around his temple. It was a sight you’d gotten used to over the past year on the run with him. His breath caught when he saw you, and the panic broke inside you like a dam bursting.
Your magic vanished in a heartbeat. You sagged against the bed, sobbing, gasping. “I thought…I thought—”
He was across the room in a second, grabbing your face with both hands, holding you like you were the last tether to something real.
“I’m here,” George whispered. “I’m here. You’re alright.”
“No, I need Fred. I need—” You broke off again, your voice cracking under the weight of everything inside you.
George’s lip trembled. His eyes were shining. You blinked furiously, searching his face. Every freckle, every line. So like him, but not him.
Your voice came out in a breathless sob. “Is he…?”
George nodded. And nodded again. And then finally whispered, “He’s alive.”
You crumpled. The world tilted, your body curling in on itself, and George caught you again before you could fall. You collapsed into his arms, fingers gripping his robes so tightly your knuckles went white. Your whole body shook with the force of the relief ripping through you.
You didn’t cry often. Not like this. Not the kind of crying that stole your breath and folded your body in half. But now you did. You cried into George’s shoulder like a child, and he held you just as fiercely.
“I thought I lost him,” you sobbed.
George’s voice cracked as he said, “You brought him back to us. You saved him.” His arms wrapped tighter around you. “I don’t know what you did. I don’t care. You saved him.”
You clung to each other like you were both drowning. It was the first time you’d ever felt like a Weasley. Like part of the family.
You didn’t ask for the healers’s permission. You didn’t wait for clearance or confirmation or signatures on hospital parchment.
You just looked at George with wild, tear-rimmed eyes and said, “Take me to him.”
He didn’t hesitate. You could barely walk. The healers tried to stop you again, but George snarled at them. Actually snarled. “She’s going. Touch her and I’ll put you through the wall.”
They backed off. You leaned on him, half-carried down the corridor. The halls blurred past you. Tile and light, blurred portraits and confused staff. Your knees nearly gave out twice. But your heartbeat pounded with one singular need - to see Fred. Touch him. Know that it worked.
George stopped in front of the door. “They’re all in there,” he said gently.
You looked up. “All of them?”
He nodded. You hesitated for just a second, your throat tightening. You remembered the way Molly had looked at you that night at the wedding. The suspicion. The fear.
What would she see now? The girl who twisted dark magic like muscle around bone? Or the girl who pulled her son back from death? The girl who made a deal with the universe that no one else dared to?
But then George squeezed your hand. “They know.”
And you stepped inside. The door creaked open like it hadn’t been touched in hours.
The first thing you saw was light - soft, golden, flickering gently from enchanted sconces. The kind of warm light hospitals rarely allowed. The second thing was silence. Not the cold, sterile kind. The heavy, sacred kind. A silence made of prayer and breath and waiting.
And then you saw them. The Weasleys. A sea of flame-touched hair and weary eyes. They were all there.
Arthur stood near the window, his shoulders stooped like he hadn’t stood up straight since the war began. Bill sat with Fleur curled against his side, both pale, both tear-stained. Even Charlie stood near the far wall, arms crossed tightly across his chest like if he let go of himself, he might break apart. Percy had his face in his hands, glasses askew. Ginny sat at the foot of the bed, her fingers knit with Harry’s. Ron stood beside Hermione, whose lips were pressed into a trembling line.
And at the center of it all was Fred. He lay on the bed like something fragile. A soul only just reattached to its body. His chest rose and fell, shallow but steady. His hair was still matted with dried blood at the temple, his face gaunt, skin too pale, but he was alive. You felt your knees start to buckle.
George steadied you instantly, his hand warm around your arm. “Go,” he said, voice low. “They know. It’s alright.”
You took one step inside. Every head turned. Every Weasley eye landed on you. For a moment, no one moved.
You felt like you were standing at the edge of a cliff again. The way you had when you were younger, first discovering what your magic could do. How it could twist and bend and cross lines that no one else dared to. You had never been more afraid.
Molly stood - the first to move. She didn’t say anything. She walked slowly across the room, her hands clenched tightly in front of her. Her lips trembled. Her eyes were swollen with crying and exhaustion and fear. You expected the cold, clipped disapproval you’d always seen from her.
Instead, she wrapped her arms around you and pulled you into her chest. Not stiffly. Not out of obligation. Fully. Completely. Like a mother who’d just gotten her child back.
You went stiff, the breath knocked out of you, and then you folded into her, shaking.
She held you tightly, her voice cracked and raw as she whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for saving my boy.”
You felt her mean it. Not tolerance. Not forgiveness offered through gritted teeth. But gratitude. Appreciation. Affection.
When she pulled back, her hands cradled your cheeks like you were something precious. “I was wrong about you,” she said. “So wrong.”
Tears streamed down your face. You didn’t have words for her. She didn’t need them.
One by one, the rest came to you. Arthur hugged you next, quieter but no less sincere. He just held your hand in both of his, nodding with glassy eyes and a trembling lip. “He’s everything to us,” he said. “You brought him back. Thank you.”
Bill. Charlie. Percy. Even Ron. All wrapped their arms around you, softer than they’d ever been. Ginny was crying before she even got to you, and Hermione - brilliant, skeptical Hermione - clutched you like a sister.
Harry just looked at you, solemn and knowing. He didn’t say a word. You didn’t need him to. He had an aura about him, like he’d crossed death’s door too. You’d ask him about it later.
George held you by the shoulders, looked you in the eyes, and said, “He’s still in there. You got him back. He just needs time.”
You nodded, throat tight. Only after George’s warning did they all step aside, clearing a path to the bed. Your hands shook as you approached. Fred looked almost peaceful.
His freckles stood out sharply against his pale skin. His lips were slightly parted, his chest moving slowly beneath the thin hospital blanket. There were lines of silver spell-stitching along his scalp where the worst of the damage had been repaired. A faint glow lingered around his body from the stabilising enchantments.
Your fingertips trembled as you reached for his hand. It was warm. Tears spilled down your cheeks, silent and unrelenting.
“I did it,” you whispered to him. “I found you. I brought you home.”
You dropped into the chair beside the bed and folded his hand between both of yours, pressing it to your lips. “I’m sorry it hurt. I’m sorry I made you come back like that. I didn’t know what else to do. I just, I couldn’t—” Your voice broke again. “I couldn’t lose you.”
You didn’t know how long you sat there. Maybe hours. Maybe minutes.
The others slowly filtered out, letting the moment belong to you. A few gave you encouraging smiles. Most just squeezed your shoulder on the way out. Molly was the last to leave.
“If he wakes,” she said gently, “send for us.”
You nodded, and then it was just you, and Fred, and time.
It happened like a ripple. A twitch in his fingers beneath your palms.
You were mid-sentence, telling him the story of how George nearly threatened a Healer for getting too close to his bandages, when you felt it.
Just a flicker. A shift in muscle.
Your heart stopped. “Fred?”
You leaned forward slowly, your hands tightening around his. You swore you imagined it, but then his lashes fluttered. Once. Twice.
He groaned softly, as though being pulled from miles below the surface of something deep and heavy.
“Freddie, I’m here,” you said, your voice cracking in half.
His brows furrowed. Then, slowly - achingly so - his eyes opened. They were bleary at first. Unfocused. Hazel brown and green like earth filtering through foliage.
He blinked at the ceiling and then his eyes landed on you. For one excruciating second, there was nothing. No spark. No recognition. Just…blankness.
“Fred,” you whispered again, panic rising in your throat. “It’s me. You’re okay. You’re safe.”
And then his gaze focused on you. You saw it ignite behind his eyes. The fire, the warmth, the mischief that lived just under the surface of him.
“Hey baby,” he rasped, voice broken and sandpaper-rough. “You look like hell.”
A sob burst from your chest. You laughed and cried at the same time, cradling his hand to your face. “Don’t flirt with me while you’re half-dead, Weasley.”
His lips twitched. The ghost of a grin. “I thought I was dead. Not just half.”
“You were. I brought you back.” You nodded, tears spilling freely now.
He stared at you. “Bloody hell.”
You laughed again, trembling. “Yeah.”
Fred shifted slightly - grimacing as pain caught in his spine - and looked down at your hands, still clutched together.
Then his eyes widened. He sat bolt upright, only to collapse back down with a groan. But he grabbed your wrist, wide-eyed.
“Wait. What—” His fingers trembled as they traced the inside of your arm. “What is that?”
You followed his gaze and stiffened at the sight. There, faintly glowing beneath your skin, just under the veins, was the same silver shimmer that laced the healing runes etched across his scalp.
Your magic. Still humming. Still tethered. The enchantment you had conducted to bring him back to the land of the living hadn’t faded.
You tried to pull your hand back instinctively, but Fred wouldn’t let go. His fingers were warm, firm, but full of wonder. And fear.
“Why do you have my spellwork?” he asked, voice low and hoarse.
“I…I don’t know,” you whispered. “It didn’t break. It should have. I anchored it to you, but it…Fred, it should have broken when your heart restarted.”
The door slammed open and a team of Healers burst into the room. “Mr. Weasley’s awake, bring the diagnostics.”
“We need to stabilize him before he crashes again. Someone get a read on his aura saturation—”
You were shoved aside. Fred reached for you, even as they pushed past. “Don’t go far,” he muttered, dazed.
“I won’t,” you whispered, backing into the corner, heart hammering.
And then you felt what would be the first of many pulls between you. It wasn’t physical - not exactly. But it felt like a thread running from his chest to yours had gone taut. The moment they cast the first stabilizing spell on him, a bolt of it reverberated through you.
You gasped, clutching your ribs. A Healer glanced over at you briefly, but said nothing.
More spells were cast. Diagnostics. Tracking charms. Restorative enchantments. Every single time…You felt all of it. Like your magic was a mirror. A tether. A second heartbeat echoing his.
You stumbled backward, eyes wide. You didn’t just save him. You linked his life force to yours.
Twenty minutes later, the room had cleared. Fred was pale but sitting up, propped by pillows. You were perched on the edge of the bed again, silent.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
You shook your head. “No.”
He reached for your hand. “Talk to me.”
You hesitated, but he waited. “I used something…old,” you said softly. “A spell I only ever read about once. It’s not just necromancy. It’s soul-binding. It was supposed to just restart your heart, but it kept the connection open. I think…Fred, I think we’re sharing the same lifeline now.”
He blinked. “Sharing it?”
“I felt every spell they cast on you.”
You met his eyes. “And if either of us died…I think the other dies too.”
A long silence stretched between you. Fred didn’t look away. He didn’t panic. He didn’t flinch.
Instead, he touched your cheek, gently, and said, “Well. You always were rubbish at letting me leave.”
Tears stung your eyes again. “Fred.”
“I’m not scared,” he whispered. “I’m not. If this is what it took…I’ll take it.”
“I do.” His voice went soft. “You did this to save me. I know you. You would’ve died for me. Instead, you bound us. So now we live together. That’s not a curse, love. I was always going to spend whatever was left of my life with you anyway.”
You broke then, folding into his chest, letting yourself shake against him. He held you like you were something sacred, not something dark and twisted and wrong. Which was entirely how you felt at that moment.
It took a half hour just to get Fred out the door. He insisted he could walk. You insisted he couldn’t.The Healers had given you both a packet of potions as thick as a textbook, complete with instructions you already knew by heart.
Fred just wanted to leave. He kept making dramatic faces, sighing like a martyr every time someone reminded him not to overexert.
You were already laughing by the time you helped him through the main atrium of St. Mungo’s. The hospital robes had been swapped for a wool jumper and loose trousers, both a bit oversized on his thinner frame. His hair still had healing runes glittering faintly along his temple.
But he was upright. He was alive. And he was going home.
You tightened your grip on his side as you stepped out into the sunlight. He leaned into you a little, not just for balance. For closeness. For quiet.
“I’ve missed fresh air,” he mumbled, closing his eyes and tipping his head to the sun.
“You were unconscious for half of it,” you teased.
“Doesn’t mean I didn’t miss it. Especially when you lot kept whispering over me like I was already a ghost.”
Fred opened his eyes, turning toward you. “Yeah. But then you bound your soul to mine like a terrifyingly romantic maniac.”
You rolled your eyes. “Shut up and get in the damn car.”
By the time you arrived at the Burrow, Fred’s knee was bouncing from excitement. Or perhaps it was from sitting too still for too long.
You saw the smoke from the chimney before anything else. The crooked silhouette of the Burrow peeked out between a line of trees, wobbly and wild-looking against the sky.
Fred shifted in his seat, growing quiet. “You alright?” you asked.
He nodded. “Just haven’t seen it since…everything.”
You knew what he meant. You hadn’t seen the building either since Bill and Fleur’s wedding when it was all on fire.
The car pulled to a stop in the drive. You got out first, jogging around to help him. He leaned heavily on you as you walked to the front door.
“DON’T SHOVE ME, GEORGE, I WILL END YOU—”
Chaos erupted. Fred barely got a word out before he was swarmed.
Molly reached him first, both arms flinging around his neck, sobs already escaping her. “My boy. My boy. Oh, thank Merlin!”
Arthur was right behind her, pulling Fred into a bone-deep hug. George and Ginny practically tackled him from the sides. Even Percy showed up, awkward and stiff but with eyes full of tears.
You let go of him, stepping aside to give them space. You hadn’t exactly been welcomed the last time you were here. Part of you wondered whether the Weasley’s sudden kindness at the hospital had been a once off occurrence. You shouldn’t have worried.
“Oi!” Fred called out over the sea of arms. “Don’t just stand there, love. Get in here.”
You hesitated. Then Molly turned to you, face blotchy and tear-streaked, and opened her arms without a word.
You didn’t even think. You stepped into her hug and were immediately wrapped in warmth and too-tight cotton and the unmistakable scent of cinnamon and soap.
“Thank you,” she whispered fiercely into your hair. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
You swallowed hard. Arthur was next. Then Ginny slung an arm around your shoulder like you’d always belonged there. George gave you a lopsided grin and muttered something about “took them long enough” under her breath.
The house swallowed you whole, cluttered and noisy and full of bread baking and chairs scooting and everyone talking at once. Fred never let go of your hand.
The sun had long since set. Fred was upstairs, tucked into his old bed. You sat beside him, knees touching, a half-empty mug of tea going cold in your hands.
He watched you in the low light. “I always knew they’d love you,” he murmured.
You smiled, quiet. “I didn’t.”
“Well,” he said, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, “you’re allowed to be wrong sometimes.”
You laughed softly, curling into the quilt beside him. There was peace in the room now. Not silence, but a slow, warm hum beneath your skin. You still felt the tether - that golden thread between your heart and his.
But it didn’t burn anymore. It just was.
“I like it here,” you whispered, almost to yourself. “With you. With your family.”
Fred turned to you, eyes sleepy and full of something soft. “You’re not just here.” He squeezed your hand gently. “You’re home.”
St. Mungo’s looked different now, and after decades you expected it should. It was cleaner. Brighter. More modern, with floating lamps and sleek walls that glowed faintly at night. But in the end, it still smelled like antiseptic and tea, and the air still held the same hush of things left unsaid.
You lay in the bed near the window, a blanket pulled up to your waist. It was a warm day. The kind that felt like late summer, even though August was barely over. Outside, London’s skyline blurred under the gentle hum of protective charms, but you could still see the sky.
It was that soft, late-afternoon gold that always reminded you of the Burrow.
A gentle knock. You didn’t answer. You didn’t need to. Fred stepped in.
His hair had silvered over the years, though a few strands of Weasley red still curled stubbornly through the rest. His face was lined, weathered, handsome in the way that comes only with a life fully lived. Even if they were only in their sixties. The moment his eyes met yours, they softened, and you could still see the boy in him. The one who’d saved your life in the Ministry, who’d made you laugh during a war, who’d stood with you, hand in hand, through every grief and every celebration.
He smiled. “You’re not gonna wait for me to steal the Healer’s records again, did you?”
You tried to smile. It didn’t quite reach your eyes.
Fred came to your side, kneeling beside the bed with a sigh. He looked at you for a long time, brushing his thumb gently along your hand. “What did they say?”
You swallowed, slowly. “It’s time.”
His face didn’t change. No panic. No disbelief. Just quiet understanding.
You continued. “They think the spell…the one I did to keep you alive… it’s been weakening me. For years, really. They said it took more than I thought. A cost delayed.”
He nodded. “And when you go…”
“You’ll go with me,” you whispered.
He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to your knuckles. “That was always the deal, wasn’t it?”
Tears slipped from the corners of your eyes. You looked at him like you had the day you were twenty and scared, like the day you said “I do”, like the day you held your first child together.
“But Fred…our kids. Our grandkids. You’ll be leaving them too.”
He shook his head, eyes bright with emotion. “They’ll be okay. You and I raised them to be strong. And they’ve got each other. And they’ll have our stories. You and me, how we began. How we held on. How we made it.”
Your voice cracked. “I’m not ready.”
Fred’s own voice dropped to a whisper. “I am. If it means being with you. If it means I never have to live in a world where I have to wake up without you beside me.”
He reached up, cupping your cheek. “You’ve been my heart since the moment you cursed me out during that first DA meeting.”
You let out a breathless laugh, and for a moment, you were both young again.
The Burrow was more crowded than ever.
The walls expanded to accommodate, as they always did, and every seat was filled. Children, grandchildren, spouses, old friends. Molly and Arthur sat near the end, hand in hand. Much older, slower, but still the warmest people in the room. George had made a joke that got the entire table roaring. Ginny passed around a bottle of mead. Percy lectured the grandkids on wand safety. Ron and Hermione - gray at the temples - sat close, stealing glances at each other as if no time had passed at all.
And at the center of it all, Fred sat beside you, holding your hand under the table.
They didn’t know. Not all of them. Not yet. But they felt it. The air was thick with something no one wanted to name. Like everyone had gathered around a fire they didn’t want to see burn out.
Laughter filled the room. Dishes clinked. Someone spilled butterbeer and no one cared. It was the kind of night you wanted to wrap around your shoulders and carry into forever.
It was also the last time you would be with them before crossing over into a place they couldn’t follow you to.
The next morning, Molly was the one to find you. As old as she was, she was still going strong. Still as motherly as ever.
She came into the bedroom with a tray of tea, humming softly. “Time to get up, lovelies. It’s a beautiful day—”
She froze. You lay in the bed, face peaceful, one hand curled over Fred’s. He lay beside you, had matched you breath for breath until there were no more. Your fingers were intertwined. Still. Neither of you stirred.
There were no signs of pain. No struggle. Just…stillness. As if you’d simply drifted into sleep and never left each other’s side.
Tears rolled silently down Molly’s cheeks. She placed the tea tray gently down, covered her mouth with her hand, and whispered, “Oh, my darlings.”
The house slowly filled with silence as news spread. And then grief.
You stood on the hill just behind the Burrow, hand in hand. Your bodies were gone, but your souls…your souls shimmered in the golden light of morning. Younger. Whole. You looked at each other and smiled, and the weight of decades lifted from your shoulders like mist.
Below, the family was gathered. George had his arms around two of your grandchildren. Ginny was already making tea for Molly. Arthur stood at the window with Hermione, talking low. Everyone was together. Everyone was safe.
Fred turned to you, his eyes shining. “They’ll be alright.”
You nodded, leaning your head on his shoulder.“And so will we.”
You looked out at the lives you had shaped - the one you’d saved - and then took a step forward. The air shimmered around you. Together, you and Fred crossed into whatever came next.
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