i'm a...i'm a man! @peterplanet - Tumblr Blog

he doesn't die in the end (there's the rest of a life to breathe in)—f.w

summary: you've always known how the story was going to end—with a crumbling wall and the ghost of a laugh on his lips. you'll do anything to keep it from happening, even if that pushes you right into his orbit. [slow burn, mutual pining, friends to idiots to lovers] [cw: mentions of death & canon-compliant violence]

wc: 14.1k [oh my god]

a/n: this fic got me through the worst of my job. it has seen me through so much and now it is urs if u want it !! and if u don't. ok. PLEASE tell me if u read it and PLEASE tell me ur every waking thought about it bc like...this is my magnum opus i fear.

masterlist | my requests are open!! | lmk what u thought !! PLEASE!!!

Despite his best efforts to achieve the contrary, Fred Weasley has found himself incapable of understanding you. You spend significant time with Professor Snape, despite the raven-haired man’s apparent distaste for everyone besides himself and a select few Slytherins, and you don’t seem to be standing in the grace of his godlight in any capacity.

When you’re not with Snape, you’re holed up in Professor Trelawney’s classroom discerning meaning from tea leaves or the wisps of smoke from sage that you’d burned. You rarely spoke more than a handful of words to anyone, but no one ever had a bad word to say about you. Even Draco Malfoy left you alone for the most part—you were odd, but not in a way that anyone seemed to dare to tease or prod with.

From the moment Fred saw you on the boats in first year, to the near five minutes that he’d watched the Sorting Hat attempt to place you, he’d known that you were odd. Everyone had. There was an air about you that seemed to match Luna Lovegood’s, but those who tried to torment you during first year had come back with whispered stories of how you’d cast a Bat Bogey Hex with only a murmur of the incantation and a subtle twist of your wand. You were odd, but you weren’t to be messed with.

Like he’s stressed—Fred Weasley didn’t understand you. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want to.

He’d tried to. He had. He’d sat next to you at breakfast and dinner, tried to show off various tricks and slights of hand he’d learned. You’d met every attempt at friendship with a kind smile and interested stare, but Fred had been hard pressed to get more than a few words out of you at a time.

George said that he was sweet on you. Ginny said it was endearing. Ron said he was barking up the wrong tree. Percy wanted Fred to get your advice on O.W.L. exams, as he was sure you were already light-years ahead on studying. And yet, Fred was single-mindedly focused on one thing only—getting you to consider yourself his friend.

His quest came to a head when Fred found himself failing Potions in fourth year. Fourteen and invincible, Fred hadn’t thought it worthwhile to pursue Potions seriously when he’d become so adept at them in his extracurriculars with George. Still, Professor Snape didn’t like that reasoning and found no basis in it. Extracurriculars don’t make up for any loss of the curricular, Mr. Weasley, he’d said.

And then he’d arranged for you to tutor Fred. It had been so sudden, so unexpected, that Fred had felt he nearly jumped out of his skin at the mention of your name. Snape must have taken it as an attempt to interject, to push back on the idea of you tutoring him, as he fixed Fred with a steely gaze that spoke volumes.

But Fred—quietly, to himself—realized that this may just be the way into your life that he’d been searching for so desperately these past three years.

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Your first study session saw Fred hearing your voice for the longest amount of time in one go.

“I was surprised when Professor Snape listed you on my study tables’ list,” you said into the silence of the Potions classroom as you flipped through a textbook. Your voice was a tender hush of a sound, but Fred reasoned that the warmth in it kept the cold of the dungeons of Hogwarts at bay.

Fred blinked at you a few times, unsure of what to say. He hadn’t known that you’d taken any stock of him as a person over the past years in school together.

“You’re good enough to make all of your Puking Pasties,” you supplied after a moment. “Do you just not like class? I imagine it’s a bit below what you’re managing on your own…probably a bit boring, then.”

You didn’t seem to be looking for a response, and Fred was too terrified to speak in the event that it stopped you from talking altogether. You continued flipping through the pages of the textbook. From what Fred could recall of Percy, Charlie, and Bill’s studies, he recognized it as the fifth-year textbook.

“Here it is,” you murmured in that same quietly warm cadence, pausing on a page. You turned the book to Fred before you started going around the classroom to collect ingredients. He tried not to think about the fact that you didn’t get everything together with a simple Accio, that you instead seemed to like the task of going from shelf to shelf collecting things by hand.

Fred couldn’t stop himself from reading the title of the page aloud, his brows furrowing. “... Babbling Beverage?” He called out to you, watching as you collected everything seemingly by memory.

You returned to the table with everything gathered in the front of your robes, having maneuvered it like a pouch to hold everything you’d needed. “Listen,” you began as you took everything out of your makeshift pouch. As if Fred would risk doing anything but exactly what you’d instructed him to. “I…may have gone out on a limb here with Professor Snape. I vouched for you. I told him about the Puking Pasties and the Pimple Vanisher. Because it’s all just Potions, and I told him that I think you’re bored. And honestly, that’s how I was, too.

“But I was annoying about it. I wore him down until he let me have access to the upper-level textbooks that he’d kept, and even some of his own recipes, and he…well, he didn’t tutor me, really. He’s not much of a mentor. But he stopped expecting me to show my work in class and gave me different essays to write. I still don’t think he likes me, and I don’t think he really likes you, either, but he’s…we need to get him to see that you can do advanced Potions if you’re interested in them. Does that make sense?”

Fred was left in the aftermath of everything you’d just shared with him. The times he’d sat at your side in the Great Hall, where he’d thought that you weren’t listening, you had been. Every time he’d tried to show you something he and George had been working on, you’d remembered. But one thing was bothering him—

“Annoying?” He repeated, his brow still furrowed as he tried to work through everything you’d just shared. “How could you be annoying?”

Fred watched as a small smile blossomed over your face as you began cutting up a few ingredients to add to the cauldron later. “Exactly as I’m managing it right now.”

He took the knife from your hands when you offered it to start cutting up the last few ingredients. You kept a watchful eye on his work, but ultimately said nothing more.

Once everything was ready, Fred started following the methodical steps with an uncanny ease. While he’d pleaded his case to Snape in much of the same way that it seemed you had, Fred had never thought that he’d be able to come to a middle-ground with any professor. He was living under the assumption that school was a stepping stone, not a place to land for the time being, and that professors wouldn’t meet him where he was.

“...I thought you didn’t like me, you know,” Fred said as he wrote down the time on a corner of parchment to note the cooling time for the potion that was brewing in front of him.

You seemed to chew on that for a moment, tasting it for what the revelation’s flavor could give you. “I’m cautious,” you supplied after another beat of silence. “I…don’t have many friends. I spend too much time with Professor Trelawney and, uh, sucking up to Professor Snape, if you were to ask some people…and I get it. I’m into the weird and quiet subjects with professors who brood or claim to know the future.”

You went quiet again. When Fred turned to look at you, he caught you scratching your nail against the top of the table and biting your lip, seemingly lost in a moment of thought. “...You’ll have to forgive me if your reputation precedes you. I didn’t know if you liked me at first, or if you were…I don’t know.” You blow out a breath, seemingly frustrated at your own lack of explanation. “Even Hermione Granger makes fun of me sometimes, Fred, and she’s as ambitious as I am. I know the circle you run in, and I thought it…I thought you were setting up some grand joke to pull over Hogwarts resident teacher’s pet. I didn’t know to trust that you weren’t until you started talking to me about your jokes instead of playing them on me.

“I’m sorry for making an assumption about you. I was wrong.”

Your little speech has taken the time that the Potion needed to cool. You don’t give Fred a chance to respond, but instead go to grab a vial to put the Potion into. It’s shimmering in the light and the color of pink bubblegum. You’re grinning, beatific, and Fred can’t help but join you.

“We’ll make a Potions Master out of you yet.”

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Fred remains troubled about what you shared with him to the point that he writes to his mother about his tutoring. He tells her what you said about thinking that you were the subject of another one of his jokes and questions, for the first time, what the difference between pranking and bullying might be. Is it who’s in on the punchline? Or is it a question of where the joke is being made?

George tells him not to worry too much about it, but Fred can’t shake the fact that he might be painted in anything other than the light of his best intentions. His mum tells him to bring you around over the Christmas holiday, almost delighted at the fact (at least in her writings) that Fred has managed to make headway with you. He thinks she might just be delighted to know that he’s finally found a subject he isn’t totally terrible at.

By this point in your tutoring sessions, Fred’s been making his way up the ranks of convoluted potions. You’re trying to petition Snape to let you make Wolfsbane next—though Fred finds that you may just want to make it under the guise of getting Fred into the more advanced levels of Potion making. He doesn’t mind, not really, because it gives him a reason to meet with you every few weeks.

You keep an eye on his homework and look it over. He asks about what Snape has set you out to research for your next assignment, since it’s different from his even though you’re in the same class. You still sit away from him in any shared classes, typically alone at a desk or at the end of a row of students who must have had no other choice than to let you join them.

But, slowly, Fred works his way into your social life. He sits with you every few days at meals, asks you questions about Transfiguration or Charms. They’re not your favorite subjects, but you keep up with the material. And, as Fred’s learned, you’re a good tutor.

People pay attention. They notice how Fred lingers around the periphery of your social life—if they would even say that you have one—and rumors start flooding. He hears them through George first, but he hears them as a warning from Ginny.

“She’s nice, Fred,” Ginny supplies one day, somewhere in the liminal space of November that sees the end of the term coming faster than he used to be able to keep up with. He’s surprised to find that, now that you’re a fixture in his life, he’s not as worried about the upkeep of work that normally bogs him down by now. “She’s good. If you so much as think about hurting her, I—”

“—I’d never, Ginny,” he assured her at the time. He wanted to believe it, but he also knew the Hogwarts rumor mill was a dangerous place.

While not as popular as Harry or well-known as those hanging in the inner circle of the Boy-Who-Lived, Fred supposes that his role as a prankster has made him more renowned than he’d have once thought possible.

He finds you uncharacteristically cornered by a group of Slytherins. Whatever they’re saying to you has left you quiet. The part that hurts Fred the most is that they’re not even casting curses or slinging hexes your way—it’s the weight of whatever they’re saying that’s been enough to stun you, some nerve exposed that you hadn’t known to deflect them off of before they’d smelled the spark of its live-wire ending.

“What seems to be the issue, lads?” Fred asks in a fake-cheery tone. The ring-leader of the group turns to expand the half-circle of students to include Fred.

Whatever he was saying must have been proven by the fact that Fred materialized at just the right moment. Fred’s left on the edge of understanding the cruelty that’s unfolded without getting to bear witness to it.

“And here he is,” one of them says, sneering. “Tell us, Weasley, is she as good of a shag as you’ve made it seem? I don’t know why even the likes of you would waste your time with her. Unless she can tell you whether your family will ever strike the gold they’ve pretended is out there for blood-traitors like—”

Fred doesn’t even have time to think before his fist is connected with the boy’s cheek.

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You manage to get McGonagall off of his back long enough to get Fred to the Hospital Wing, promising that there will be another time to be angry at his moment of inopportune violence. You do a good job of dodging questioning stares and bulldozing past outright attempts to ask what had happened. The Hogwarts rumor mill will continue to churn, it seems, and Fred has done nothing of benefit in getting himself tangled into it any further than he already was.

Fred expects you to be angry. You sit him in a bed and alert Madam Pomfrey to your arrival before you join him in the room, sitting down on the bed across from him. Your quiet is disconcerting after he’s spent so long knowing just how talkative you can be, and he doesn’t know what to do. So, he talks.

“Has it been that bad before?” He asks as he stretches out his knuckles, feeling the scratch of bruised skin as it gives way above moaning bones that protest at the continued movement. The pain gives him something to focus on that isn’t his anger. “Why wouldn’t you get me if it was?”

You’re not looking at him, so he goes quiet. He knows you’ve heard him from how you’re biting your lip—it’s how you think through a question that you need to get the answer out to.

A few minutes pass in uneasy silence that Fred wants to break with more questions before you answer. “...it’s never been good,” you finally say. “Usually it’s just taunting about prophecies and crystal balls or sucking up to Snape.

“I usually have some way of getting out. I can raise my wand and see someone flinch, which gives me a few seconds to slip out. Or…I can scare someone with a fake prophecy. “But…they’ve never had any other material to go off of, I guess. I’m not used to someone making fun of…of my friends. I suppose they’ve never had anyone else to tie me to. I didn’t expect to get so angry that I wouldn’t do anything, though.”

Fred realizes now that your silence hasn’t been an angry one. It’s been full of guilt.

He calls your name softly as he realizes what this is—the self-deprecation because of the belief that you should have done something you’ve never been prepared to. The truth behind it makes Fred’s heart crack in his chest in a way that leads him to believe it might break right out from behind his ribcage—you’ve never had a friend that required defending. You didn’t know what to do because you’ve never had someone else to protect before.

“You’re my friend,” Fred reiterates, stern in how he speaks so that you catch his gaze again with the shock of it. He needs you to know that so badly that he aches with it. “And you don’t have to defend me. I’ve heard that before, okay? The Weasley name has been through worse. You…I mean, it’s your choice as to what you do next time. But I need you to know that I’m right behind you when they come back. And…and I know you’ve handled it alone, and I know that you can, but…tell me, okay? If it gets bad again. If they come after you just because you’re my friend.”

Fred’s startled to see the rush of tears that spring in your eyes, but he pretends not to see them. He mainly doesn’t know what to do with someone who’s upset, let alone a girl that isn’t Ginny. But he’s starting to figure it out, he realizes—the line between a jester and a bully is right here, in the hospital wing of Hogwarts. It’s the punchline coming after the first blow was already landed against someone he cares about.

He makes a promise to keep that idea tight to his chest. For you, if for no one else.

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You come to the Burrow for Christmas. Your parents, evidently delighted at the prospect of you having a friend to spend the holiday with, ship you off for the stretch between Christmas and the New Year to return to Hogwarts with the Weasleys.

Fred meets your parents when he and his parents go to collect you. They’re quiet people, too. And, much to his father’s delight, they’re Muggles. Despite your preparation for your house’s short connection to the Floo Network, your mother still jumps at the sight of the three Weasleys stepping out of your fireplace in a plume of green smoke.

His father takes time poking and prodding at every electrical device in the house. Fred is mortified and trying desperately to get him away from the telly, to stop asking about the phone and how it works, but you silence him with a knowing smile. Your own father seems endeared by the process of explaining electricity to a Wizard.

“He never thought we’d have things that Wizards didn’t,” your mother supplies quietly to Mrs. Weasley. “Would anyone like tea? We’ve made biscuits as well, if you have a minute to stay.”

His mother, to her credit, is also delighted at the hospitality she’s being shown.

The half hour spent in your childhood home teaches Fred far more about you than he expected it to. He learns that your father works as an electrical engineer, that your mother teaches at a local primary school. He learns that you have a sister much older than you who has a family of her own, and that, while your family doesn’t wholly understand the world of Magic, they accept you nonetheless.

He learns that your mother is still wary of the owls that you sent at first, even despite your constant explanations, and that you go to send your post to your family from Hogsmeade every month and retrieve it from the Hogs Head Inn in kind. This arrangement was brought about by Dumbledore when you’d gone to him in your first year, terrified by the kindly man who, Fred reasons, likely had something to do with the way that you’re tutored in school. His mum demands to be shown how to send letters in this way, determined to stay up-to-date in a less-overwhelming way with your parents. You seem taken aback by this willingness to be included in such a miniscule way, but don’t comment.

When your fathers are done discussing the electrical paneling of your home, you’re shuffled out with a hug from both of your parents and a bag filled with gifts. It’s Fred’s turn to be taken aback by something—the notion that your parents, while kind, had thought to help you get gifts for his family.

This gleaning into your life makes Fred worried about the chaos of his own life that you’re about to uncover, but he tries to stamp it down. No use in worrying about what hasn’t happened yet.

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Fred watches you absorb the Burrow for what it is with barely-contained fascination. He’s never seen someone take in the house, the everything that made him into the wizard that stepped into Hogwarts, and wanted them to like him so badly despite the revelations.

Your family is clean. The house was tidy, the dishes sorted by hand. His house is…loud. It’s chaos spilling between doorframes and into living spaces, screams of different names being chased into rooms when childish fights break out. Fred isn’t often embarrassed of where he came from, but for the first time in a very long time, he finds himself nervous about what you might think of the place and people that raised him.

You leave your trunk and bag of gifts in the living room to go outside and step back from the house. Fred catches his mother watching you from the kitchen window as she sets to tending to the morning’s dishes with a few orchestrated flicks of her wand.

“This…” You trail off for a moment as you look up to the Burrow, eyes alight with a wonder that Fred’s never really seen directed towards anything his family has. “Your house is beautiful, Fred.”

If he didn’t know you at this point, he’d think you were making fun of him. But when your gaze catches his, he can feel the sincerity burning through it. He tries not to let the vision of it catch in his chest for too long, lest it require naming the feeling he had caught himself harboring for you. Something more than was called for by the label of friend. Something more than he thought you’d want of him.

“Will you show me around, please?” You’ve never been one for pleading, and Fred nearly startles at the realization that he’s willing to do just about anything you ask of him with a tone like that.

He takes you through his childhood home while trying not to focus on the reverence in your gaze. He starts from the top of the stairs outside of Ron’s room, not opening the door to invade the privacy he knows his brother needs. He tells you about the family ghoul who, at the mention of his existence, begins to rattle the ceiling in a way that startles delighted laughter out of you.

He leads you then past the room that Bill and Charlie used to share, past his parents’ bedroom. He takes you into his own room, cringing at the scent of gunpowder and wishing that he’d taken his mother’s offer of a candle since you’d be sharing a room with the twins during your stay. George greets you with a flourish into their humble abode and you promise to come help him with whatever he’s been working on in the afternoon that Fred had—in George’s words—abandoned him to collect you.

By the time you’re in the kitchen, his mum’s already setting up to prepare dinner. You startle at the sight of pots and pans cleaning themselves in the kitchen sink, and Fred watches as you take note that his mother is doing nonverbal magic to start preparing supper. He sees the questions you want to ask in the furrow of your brow, but takes notice as the quiet version of you comes out. You’re not used to being welcomed somewhere new. You don’t know the rules around asking questions that some professors might deem pestering.

Thankfully, Molly Weasley has dealt with her fair share of anxious teenagers. She brings Harry Potter back to full health every summer before he goes to school. When she catches your questioning stare, she’s interjecting before Fred can start to explain.

“Is there something I can get you, dearies? Fred, are your manners so lost that you wouldn’t offer her a bite to eat or a drink? Or tell her where to put her trunk?” The knowing stare she fixes Fred with seems to have thawed away at some of the hesitance you were feeling.

“Actually, Mrs. Weasley—”

“—it’s Molly, dear, no need for such formalities—”

“—right, uhm, Molly,” you go on, biting your lip as you take a moment to try not to lose your courage at being interrupted. If Fred could survive the aftermath of yelling at his mother, he’d reprimand her and remind her of your reticent nature that he’d tried to warn his entire family about. “I hope you’ll excuse me saying this, but you’re…to do all of these spells at once, you’re an incredible Witch. Talented, I mean. If that’s…okay to say?”

It’s rare that Fred sees his mother stunned into silence, and rarer still that it’s not because of how angry he and George had made her. And while Fred’s never thought of his mother in such a light as you’re seeing her, he finds himself ashamed to admit that it’s true in a way he’s taken for granted.

“Well…” Molly struggles for only a minute longer, and it seems an apology is about to tumble from your lips before she’s rounding out from behind the counter to pull you into one of her all-too-warm hugs. “What pleasure has Fred gotten hiding you all to himself these past few years? Thank you, dear, but it isn’t too much work when you’re used to it. In fact, there’s a few books I could lend you if you like about the common household spells. Did me wonders when I moved out on my own.”

You beam at her as she lets you out of the tight hug. She takes you from Fred then to show you what she’s doing. While you might not be able to do magic outside of school, you’re an apt study based on the way you mimic her wand movements under the counter as she exaggerates them for your benefit.

In the meantime, Fred thinks of the question his mum had asked, about how much of a pleasure it has been to have you as a private piece of his—and to a lesser extent, George’s—life at Hogwarts. But, he reasons, he would give it all up for the way that you’re fitting in with his family.

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He isn’t brave enough that Christmas to broach asking you more than he already has about yourself. He keeps his questions in a vault in his head to the best of his ability for the rest of the year, except for the ones that slip through the cracks. He mainly asks about your Muggle parents, your sister and her family. He tries to keep the questions casual so that when a more serious one slips out, you won’t startle and go quiet.

He can’t help it, though, when you come to the Burrow for the summer between fifth and sixth year. You’re beatific in the sunlight of the Burrow’s lawn, having helped him and George pull up gnomes for the better part of the afternoon despite his mother’s insistence that you take the afternoon to relax. Your hair fans out around your head and catches sunlight in the strands in a way that Fred wishes he was able to properly wax poetic about. As it stands, though, he’s only sixteen. All he knows is that his breath stutters at the picture before him and he feels it catch behind his ribs.

To distract from the feeling, the question he’s always wondered slips out. “How have you always been able to tell George and I apart?”

Your eyes crack open to study him from your spot on the lawn, your teeth drawn over your lip as you take a moment to think. He almost apologizes for having made you sit up as you do it, leaning back on your hands as you appear to chew over his comment for a moment.

“I don’t know how anyone who knows you two can’t,” you answer honestly after a moment. “It’s…you smile differently, did you know that? And…your laughs. They’re similar, yeah, but…yours stutters out of you. George’s doesn’t.”

You say this like it doesn’t fundamentally shift his sixteen-year-old-world on its side for a moment and leave him sprawling in the aftermath of such a casual confession.

Fred Weasley, who had struggled to catch your attention and hold it for the better part of four years, has been recognized as himself. He’s been seen as more than a package deal, and you’ve said it like it’s nothing. He doesn’t know where to go from here.

So, he does what he thinks he often does best—he attempts to deflect.

“You should really tell mum that, y’know. Maybe she’d have an easier time when she’s mad at telling us apart…”

His easy grin must suffice in showing you that he’s joking, because you let the conversation die as you lay back down in the grass and let the sunlight stream into your hair again. Beatific, he thinks, and resolves himself to find synonyms for the word by the end of the summer holiday.

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By his final year at Hogwarts, Fred’s started a mission. A quiet one as he and George prepare to leave Hogwarts during your shared seventh year.

Amongst themselves, they call it Operation Be Okay. Because the truth is, despite how supportive you are of their need to leave Hogwarts, Fred is terrified that leaving will ruin everything that the two of you have built. And beyond that, he’s terrified that you’re going to feel the absence of himself and his brother in ways that you’re not allowing yourself to adequately prepare for.

Your first Christmas with the Weasleys started a tradition that saw you spilling into the fabric of the Burrow. His mum often jokes that you need your own spoon on the clock, as do Harry and Hermione. You come over in the summers for weekends and steal moments whenever you can. He spends time with your family, too, and George often tags along to make sure you leave room for Merlin. Of course George knows how he feels about you—they share a brain most days and have since they were born. To your credit, if you hear anything George says when it’s being not-so-quietly whispered, you keep your face neutral and never comment.

All of this is to say that Fred is worried that you’ll slip back into old, quiet habits when they leave. He tries to set you up with Luna Lovegood, but as lovely as she is and as well as the two of you get on, you’re both quiet creatures who rarely share thoughts until you feel comfortable.

Hermione doesn’t know how to talk to you about anything else besides school. Ron is still at a point where he’s intimidated by you from a prophecy you claimed to see about spiders in his future, though Fred’s told him you haven’t ever had a prophecy come true because none of them were real.

When he’s about out of options that don’t involve him staying in school and sitting his N.E.W.T.s—a thought he never believed would ever cross his mind—he comes to breakfast to find you sitting next to Harry Potter. He’s almost worried for a moment that Harry has taken you on as a charity case, or someone he needs to be friends with on behalf of his best friend’s brother, but when he approaches the table and takes the seat next to you with Harry on your other, he hears you speaking in whispered tones and looking at something in his palm.

Fred does his best not to startle at the sight of a snake in Harry’s hand. He tries even harder to stifle the chill that runs up his spine without his permission at the sound of Harry speaking Parseltongue. Still, he can’t stop the whispered, “Blimey,” that leaves him at the picture painted before him. Harry instantly stops talking and looks hesitant to continue. You, however, reach out and stroke the snake’s nose in an attempt to soothe it. Its eyes catch Fred’s as if knowing that he was the reason Harry stopped speaking.

“Isn’t it so cool, Fred?” You ask in a tone that tells Fred you’re not joking at all—not that you ever would with the way your gaze catches the reproachful expression painted on Harry’s face. “Harry’s been helping me talk to her. I found some students destroying her little nest that she was trying to make to lay her eggs, Harry said, and they were just tormenting her…she was being flung around in the air, oh, it was awful…”

Fred doesn’t think the snake can understand you, but she must sense the jagged edge of your tone as she slides into your outstretched hand. She slides up your sleeve, evidently happy enough with you to be burrowing into your clothes. “Harry said she doesn’t think she needs any special attention or help, but she’s happy to be away from the torture. I was going to let her out by the Black Lake before Potions—apparently there’s lots of rotted logs there for her that she really likes, and sometimes the merpeople sing to her at night. I tried to give her some bacon, but she likes live food better…”

To Harry’s credit, he’s not outright appalled by your apparent care for the snake in your sleeve. In fact, he seems endeared by the way you’re talking to her. Fred supposes that he doesn’t often get people asking him to speak Parseltongue, nor does he often get such rave reviews about his ability to do so. And how so very like you, Fred thinks, to see how you can solve a problem and set out to do just that.

“I should take her there now,” you decide after quickly finishing the last of your breakfast in a few succinct bites. “Harry, can you tell her that, please? That I’m taking her to the water with the rotted logs and warm sun?”

Harry leans down and whispers something in Parseltongue. Whatever the snake says has Harry grinning while you stand, clearly sensing that the brief exchange has ended. Fred wouldn’t put it past you to have learned a bit of Parseltongue in this small time, or at least the cadence of a conversation in it to know when an exchange is over.

“She says that she’d like to show you her babies when they hatch, if you’d like. Where you leave her is where they’ll be after three full moons—uh, three months—from now. She doesn’t…know what a month is, so I guess maybe go by her timeline.” Harry seems to sense that Fred has been listening to your exchange and sees the moment that he realizes that others have probably heard him speaking Parsletongue, people that would judge him for it. Fred knows well how easy it is to get wrapped up in the starlight that you seem to possess, the bubble that you carry that makes it feel like no one hears what shouldn’t be divulged. He also knows that you won’t let anyone give Harry a hard time for it.

You prove this when you catch Dean Thomas’s disgusted stare towards your sleeve and his incredulous look to Harry himself. Catching his gaze with your own, you tilt your head to the right ever-so-slightly and let your eyes glass over. “Mousetraps…how odd. And a bloody sketchbook. Though it doesn’t stop you for long…you have a beautiful sketchbook, don’t you?”

Shaking your head, you walk away without a further comment. Fred does his best to smother the grin that’s threatening to overtake his features at your fake prophecy. Word had gotten around about everyone’s boggarts, surely, and you’d still been kind enough to make it so Dean knew he wouldn’t, had this been a true moment of Sight, lose the function to draw forever.

When Fred catches Harry’s eye, he knows that he’s having a similar moment of self-control.

The moment passes when Dean gets up, looking markedly greener than he had before. Harry’s grin splits his face into something younger than he often seems, boyish in a way that Fred rarely sees him. With the weight of the world hanging on his shoulders, Fred reckons it’s hard to get to feel normal, to have a moment of reprieve.

“...She’s brilliant, isn’t she?” Harry says. “I mean, you do, but…no one…” Fred lets Harry trail off, knowing that this isn’t the time to give him words to let him choose from. “I just mean that it’s rare I get someone coming up with a snake and asking me to talk to it. I almost thought she was taking the piss at first, you know? I know she’s your friend and your mum says she isn’t like that, but, I dunno…”

“I get it,” Fred says when he senses that Harry needs him to supply something more than understanding glances and knowing silence. “She’s one of my best mates, Harry, but I know how intimidating she seems at first. She doesn’t like to be fucked around with, y’get it? And it isn’t anything personal. She just…takes some warming up to.”

Harry nods when he takes that in. “I knew she wasn’t taking the piss when I went to yell at her. She was almost crying, I think, and told me everything she told you—injured snake and students throwing it in the air. And when the snake started talking with me, she…she seemed to be really relieved.”

The boys go quiet for a few moments. There isn’t much Fred can say to that, he reasons, when it’s what he’s known about you all along. You’re a hard shell to crack, but you wouldn’t have gone to Harry if you didn’t know he wouldn’t give you a hard time. He thinks that, maybe, introducing you to Luna might have given you this perspective. He makes a mental note to thank her later.

“Say, mate, can I…” It’s Fred’s turn to trail off for a moment, hesitant to ask Harry to take on any more responsibility than the Wizarding World is giving him. “...can I ask a favor of you, actually? I know it’s more than I should ask with everything you’ve given me and George already, but…”

Harry nods, as if telling him to go on. Fred takes a breath before he does.

“George and I are going to start our own joke shop this year. We’re…with Umbridge, we’re planning not to sit N.E.W.T.s. And I…”

Fred didn’t think he’d get this far with anyone, really. He didn’t think about how to ask for this.

“What I’m getting at is that…I care about her more than I really have the words for. I know she’s capable of surviving half a year without me, but I also know she wouldn’t tell me if the rest of her year is shit because of our leaving. And, so…I was hoping, maybe, you’d keep an eye on her.”

At the look Harry fixes him with—the are you sure she’d let me? look he knows so well—Fred presses on. “I’m not saying you have to suddenly be her best mate or anything. I just…ask her about the snake in three moons. Or the Potions she’s learning to brew. Merlin, whatever…I think you’d both have more to talk about than you think.”

Harry stews that over before he adds. “...you really love her, don’t you?”

Naming the feeling behind his ribs is a terrifying thing. It’s anxiety-inducing to give the force a name to go by in front of the Boy-Who-Lived. Fred has known what it is for a while, known what to call it and how to define it for longer than he’s really understood what it implied, but he finds that, despite the anxiety, it isn’t scary to realize.

“I do,” he admits, firmer in his tone than he’d expected. “And…again, I know I don’t have a lot of room here to ask you for anything. But what…I’d appreciate it, Harry. She’s not that bad when you get to know her.”

He does his best to ignore the smarmy look Harry Potter fixes him with, and instead takes it as a vow that he’ll keep you in sight for the better part of the next year. He also, maybe foolishly, trusts him not to tell anyone that he loves you. He thinks, as Harry looks at Ginny when he hears her laugh a few seats down, that Harry might know a thing or two about holding out hope for someone to return the feelings you have.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Harry writes to Fred and George every few weeks after they leave Hogwarts. He tells them that, shockingly, even Peeves has taken a liking to you now that the twins have left. You’re still quiet, but you don’t tell Harry to leave when he sits next to you every few meals. You don’t seek him out, though. Fred thinks you’re too scared to hope that someone might want to be friends with you of their own volition when there’s a common link between you.

Your letters tell Fred that you know he asked Harry to look after you. You don’t seem to mind, though. He’s teaching you about Quidditch, and you’re helping him with some of his coursework. Fred wonders if you’re one of a few people who can make Harry Potter feel like a normal teenager every now and then.

Fred and George corner you every month at Hogsmeade. Harry joins sometimes, as do Luna and Hermione. Your circle has been expanding in a way that surprises Fred, in a way that makes him wish he would’ve known how willing you were to be introduced to others. He does, however, wonder if Harry has something to do with it.

Harry Potter has a way of pulling people together. Be it his reconciling with the fickle way that life seems to be or the world’s weight on his shoulders, he’s never been one to shy away from connecting his friends with one another.

It’s on a Hogsmeade outing that Fred is approached by Harry. You’re standing farther back with Luna, and the two of you are talking in hushed tones that he can’t decipher from a distance, but Fred can tell that something’s wrong.

Before he can go to you, Harry’s stopping him with a gentle hand to his arm. George lingers and tries and fails to look entirely uninterested with the conversations that are circling around him.

“She’s…” Harry trails off for a moment. “She’s seen something, I guess. She won’t talk to anyone about it but Luna, Trelawney, and Dumbledore, and you know what it’s like to get an answer out of Luna…”

Fred visibly starts at that. He’s shocked by the idea that your time with Trelawney has been for some reason other than mere interest—he’d never thought to ask if you had the gift of Sight. He’d always written it off as a hack branch of Magic, but he’s startled to realize that you might have it.

“Anyways, mate, she’s feeling like she won’t be very good company today. She’s more…like she used to be, if that makes sense.” Harry seems reproachful at that, but Fred doesn’t blame him.

You’ve always had a tendency to slip back into your quiet ways and muted nature. Fred tries not to take it personally, but he does feel awful to think that these episodes have been a result of any visions.

Fred thanks him and moves on to go see you. Hack branch of Magic or not, he hates the idea of you upset. He expects you to go quiet when he approaches you, but he’s startled once again when the sight of him brings you to instant tears.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

The truth won’t be brought out of you then. You tell Fred that there’s some things you can’t share, not really, and that he has to trust you enough to let it be for now. He tries to, at least.

He sits next to you in a clearing in Hogsmeade and remembers the day that you’d laid in the Burrow’s lawn. You always seem more at peace when the sun’s on you, shining and warm, casting a halo around your hair. You’re calmer now, though you seem exhausted.

“I have…dreams,” you admit. “I don’t like talking about them much. People don’t…I get how everyone sees Divination, and half the time I don’t know what I’m seeing until I live it later. I’ve had a few, uh, potent dreams, if you’d call them that, but…” You trail off, biting your lip, and Fred lets the silence hang. He knows you’re just struggling to find words for what you want to say.

You take a deep breath before you go on. “I had one of the potent ones last night. I talked to Dumbledore, but…I mean, Harry will tell you that he’s not always a great source of wisdom like people think. The good thing about the dreams, though, according to Trelawney, is that they’re not set in stone. I’ve done it before, y’know, little things—I once won my parents a lot of money on the Euromillions because we got so many numbers right, but I’d known all of the numbers. Nothing bad happened when I didn’t give all of the numbers.”

At the confused look Fred is fixing you with, you rush out, “Muggle thing, uh, like betting, almost? I’ll show you someday.” You take another breath before you add, “...I’ve been having more dreams about the War.”

“You’ve what?” Fred asks, incredulous. “Why didn’t you say anything? And—And more dreams? You’ve had enough of them before to have a baseline?”

The groan you let out is so unlike you that Fred nearly laughs. “And say what, Fred? That I probably have some version of the gift of Sight and sometimes I have dreams that come true? Or that I can tell a lot from tea leaves and sage signals?

“No one would take me seriously. And they already don’t. Shit, Dumbledore barely believed me until I knew the password to his office without being told. I don’t…I don’t get access to the information all the time. I’ve been working with Firenze, too, but…most wizards don’t get access to True Sight until after they’re of age. It’s hard to explain, and I sound fucking crazy, I know—”

Fred takes your hand in his at that, holding it tightly in his own to stop your rambling in its tracks. “I don’t think you sound crazy,” he tries to mollify you. “You’re one of the brightest witches I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And you’ve spent way too much time with Trelawney to be doing it for the love of tea, right? I should’ve known.”

“You couldn’t have,” you say, your voice taking on a far-away quality that reminds Fred so much of the quiet fourteen-year-old who taught him Potions and took the time to make an effort. “You can’t know what you were never told, Fred. Don’t take it personal. I just…it’s hard. I see…”

Your voice catches as you seem to remember whatever it is that you’re holding close to your chest. “I see a lot of loss. And it’s shit to be the one to see it all. Harry…he knows what he can. I try not to tell people the dreams unless they’re not in them, but…Merlin, he already has so much on his plate, y’know? What good does it do to tell him about the loss that he knows is coming? Why hurt him by making it something tangible?”

You shake your head at that before going on, “Anyways, I’m not…I’ll be okay. It just rattled me, I guess. I haven’t had this dream in a while, and it’s been the longest one I’ve had. Like, I’ve been having it since before I knew I was a Witch. I dunno.”

“...Dumbledore’s going to let me in on more Order meetings, though,” you confess. “I need to talk to Shacklebolt about some stuff, and Lupin.” You heave a sigh and let your head fall to your knees, forehead kissing the skin your skirt is rucked up above. “I don’t know how Harry does it all, really. It’s just a fucking dream, y’know?”

Fred doesn’t comment on that, because he doesn’t know. His nightmares have seemed to take on a pale edge in comparison to the real-life preludes you get. He’s hardly been immune to the idea that you’d spend time with Harry and want to join the cause, but he’s surprised to know that your involvement is likely more of a result of something intrinsic to you.

“Can I ask something?” Fred wagers after a few moments of silence.

You nod, turning your cheek so that you can peer at Fred without lifting your head. Your arms wrap around your legs to pull them a bit tighter to yourself, which makes Fred realize that he’s been holding your hand this entire time as you let go of his in the process. He tries not to dwell on it or be embarrassed.

“So, it makes sense why you’d be drawn to Divination, y’know, all things considered…but Potions?” He queries, feeling his brow furrow. “Spending time with Snape?”

You sit up fully as you think about what to say, teeth meeting your lip to worry it for a moment as you start to parse it out slowly. “I’ve known there’s going to be some form of a battle since I was a kid,” you supply. “But once I realized what I was seeing, or what I was, y’know, imagining it all to mean…I knew I needed to help make salves and medicines for whatever came. I knew I needed to be good at it, too. I dunno. It felt like something tangible I could do, even if I was having those dreams. It was something I could do in the moment to prepare.”

Fred feels hollow now that you’ve explained it. He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. He lets the moment play out around you and heaves a breath at the realization that you’ve always been preparing yourself for something that no one really knew was coming and how heavy that must be.

He wonders, then, why it had taken him so long to introduce you to Harry Potter.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Harry Potter keeps you safe that year. He sees you through the end of your Wizarding education, stands proud at your graduation with the rest of the school. In a lot of ways, Fred was right to involve you with him. He was right to bring you closer.

Your dreams only increase in frequency as the War draws to a head. Fred watches them yield real results—a warning to Fletcher and Moody to be safe, a carefully clipped edge to your tone when you tell them to stay together. Moody comes back from the Battle of the Seven Potters ashen. Fletcher didn’t Disapperate without grabbing hold of Moody, and they were able to escape together.

Moody isn’t one for theatrics, nor is he one for grovelling. But the look he fixes you with—both eyes seeing you—and the way he grumbles out, “...I’m sorry for doubting you,” tells everyone more than any platitude would’ve.

You don’t, however, see George losing an ear or Bill’s attack from Greyback. You’re inconsolable as you sit by George’s bedside, and no one can move you from his side, but the worst part is that you aren’t crying. There’s just a general unease about you, some magic that feels like it’s vibrating as it surrounds you. It’s a raw energy that you don’t seem aware you’re harnessing into the Potions you’re brewing, and it’s not a wonder to him that they’ve all turned out better than even your best batches. Your grief of not knowing has channeled into something tangible.

Fred has to be the one to bring you food—you spend time changing George’s bandages and reapplying the salve you’ve made under Snape’s guidance and preparing Wolfsbane for Bill. At this rate, he’s going to have a lifetime supply of it.

Neither Weasley has blamed you. Bill had shaken you off of him with a knowing glance when you’d tried to tell him about the various salves and potions he could try. As a Curse Breaker, he reminded you, he was aware of what could be done, and your supply of what he needed was already so overfilled that to prepare more might be wasteful.

No one in the Order has blamed you, in fact. You’ve spent time with Snape trying to learn Occulumency with Harry, as it wouldn’t hurt to be able to talk to your Inner Eye. You seem to be terribly convinced that the casualties of War could be prevented if you just had a way to See.

Fred’s belief is more modest. He thinks, though he hasn’t told you, that you can only See when it’s a matter of life or death. George missing an ear is hardly a great loss. Nor is it a great pain for Bill to experience a fraction of what Remus experiences every month. Worse, Fred’s worried that the stress you’re putting yourself under could hurt more than it helps.

George sends you away after a week of constant vigilance and more salve than he knows what to do with. “You’re hovering worse than mum,” he admonished, though there’s no heat behind his words. It’s the same exasperation that he shows towards Ron or Ginny when they linger for too long. “You need to go be something other than a Witch for fifteen minutes, seriously. Go…read a book, or pull gnomes, or something!”

Fred follows you out into the lawn of the Burrow. Early evening is casting golden light across the lawn as you plop down and draw your legs up to your chest. There’s chairs behind you, though Fred thinks better than to mention this.

He doesn’t know how to do this part. He’s reminded of the time in the Hospital Wing, where you’d been teary at the prospect of being friends, and then thinks of how much has changed since then. How much your relationship has changed, at least to him, or how much he wants it to.

There’s so much unsaid that Fred is nearly bursting with it. But he plops down next to you and chooses, for a time, to say nothing at all. Because there is no easy way to do this—it’s War, and it rarely feels like there’s time for selfish whims. There’s hardly time for him to breathe before there’s another Order mission, let alone confront the named feeling behind his ribs and give it space to breathe between the two of you.

Instead of saying anything to that effect, Fred looks over at you. Your head is pressed into your legs, and he takes a moment to realize how run-down you’ve become. It doesn’t look like you’ve taken much time for yourself in the past week, let alone made time for basic self-care.

“Can I do a hygiene spell?” He asks, taking the coward’s way out.

The question must be as unexpected in content as it is in its delivery, because a laugh tumbles out of you before you can tamp it down. “You really know how to charm a girl, Weasley,” you say, though you motion for him to do what he’d said.

The relief it gives you seems immediate. “Jesus,” you cringe as you take a new whiff of yourself. “Have I been that bad that I didn’t even notice?”

You once tried to explain Jesus and Christianity to Fred, though all he really took away from it was that he knows that to invoke the name of the Son of God is equivalent—in some ways, you’d hedged—to invoking the name of Merlin.

“...to be honest, I hadn’t noticed, either,” Fred admits. “I think we’re all a bit…run down.”

You nod at that, dragging out a breath until you appear empty, deflated against your own body and somehow smaller than you were before. When you don’t say anything, Fred goes on, “...you’re not responsible for everyone’s well-being, you know. You don’t have to know everything.”

That seems to set you off. It’s rare that Fred sees you so desperate to convey a message, let alone have the ire of a misunderstanding directed towards him.

You sit up straight and turn to face Fred, sitting cross-legged on the lawn as the sunset paints your shadow red. “But who else will?” You press, desperation bleeding into your tone as you try to get him to understand. “Really, Fred, if it’s not me, who else? Trelawney? Firenze, when he’s not being hunted by his own kind in between episodes of being ostracized?”

You scoff at that, shaking your head. “I know I don’t have to. But I didn’t get to choose this, Fred. I didn’t ask for it, and if I could turn it off I would!” You suck in a shaky breath at that, and Fred finds himself startled to realize you’re about to start crying. “But I can’t, so I have to do something. And it fucking sucks that it still isn’t enough—people are getting hurt, and I didn’t see it. And isn’t some pain worse than death? Isn’t some pain worth Seeing?”

Just as quickly as Fred’s realized that you’re going to start crying, you do. It’s not a heaving thing, nor is it a gasping shudder that he expected. It’s quiet, pressed into your hands as you try desperately to get it to stop.

He will later chastise himself for hesitating so long to hug you. He scrambles to do it once the thought crosses his mind, folding you into his grasp. And he doesn’t know what to say to that, not really, because there isn’t really anything to say. He’ll never know what it’s like to See with stunning clarity the pain that will come to the people you love and still not be able to See other pain that you would’ve done anything to prevent.

“I don’t know,” he admits, earnest as he presses a quick kiss to the side of your head. His hand rubs up and down your arm in a steady path. “But I know that you don’t have to hold all of this alone. I know you don’t like talking about what you’re dreaming, but…I’m good at sitting with you, I think. Even if we don’t talk about it—put me to work. Make me useful in making Potions, or even I can just remind you to shower. It’s a lot to hold, and I don’t want you to think that you have to hold it alone.”

He tries not to cringe at how you only seem to cry harder at that. Most of all, he tries to take the release of emotion as a compliment and not a criticism.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

To your credit, you do try to take care of yourself better following your breakdown. It isn’t perfect, but Fred supposes he can’t blame you for that. With Harry, Ron, and Hermione on the run, it’s hard for anyone to feel totally at ease. It’s especially difficult following the disaster of a wedding party that Bill and Fleur had, and Fred imagines you shoulder some of the blame for that despite not needing to.

He catches you in his mum’s garden more often than not as the weather starts to turn to the simmering temperatures that August often brings. He finds you there tonight, weeding by hand despite knowing the spells to tend to the garden. He doesn’t point this out, but instead takes a place by your side and starts copying your movements in pulling out weeds.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done this by hand before,” he muses after a moment. “Mum never used it as a punishment, at least.”

You shake your head at that, though a small smile is working its way over your face. “...My dad has a garden at home,” you admit quietly. “One of the first incidents of accidental magic I did was when we were out weeding, actually. I wanted so badly to be done and to get to go in and watch a movie with my mum that I just…got rid of all the weeds.

“And he wasn’t even mad or scared. He just sat back and said, ‘Well, if you wanted to be done that badly, I would’ve let you go in a long time ago,’ and we went inside and watched telly.” A small laugh escapes you, and Fred can tell that you’re in the pleasant memory as much as you can be at a time like this. “Every summer after Hogwarts, I’d help him with the weeding, and he’d ask me if there was a spell for gardening that I could use again. But I liked the routine of it, to be honest, and the excuse it gave me to spend time with him.”

Fred can’t help the questions that he asks next. “Do…Do your parents know about the War? And your Sight?”

You draw in a sharp breath, evidently taken straight out of the pleasant memory. “...When I got my Hogwarts letter, Dumbledore delivered it so he could explain everything to my family. I asked him then if it explained my dreams, if every Witch and Wizard had them. And he’d been startled then, so I’d just kept going, and my parents looked too relieved by the idea that all of this could be normal in some parts of the world that they’d never known about…but he told us what we both know.

“So, my parents have always known. I’d won us some money a few times, like I told you before, but…I told them that I was having dreams about the War last summer, and that I needed to stay away from home for a while because…You-Know-Who wanted to kill people like me, and especially people like them. I haven’t written them—I can’t until this is all behind us.” You let out the sharp breath you’d taken only moments before.

Fred feels bad, then, for bringing it up. He hadn’t realized how much time you’d spent with members of the Order over the past year as things picked up—he hadn’t been keeping close tabs on you and had assumed you’d gone home for a meal every now and then. But you’d probably had your parents’ house disconnected from the Floo Network before the Minster for Magic had been killed. Likely, too, that you’d erased all trace of that ever existing somehow with the help of the Order.

Too unsure of what to say to break the moment, Fred keeps his steady pace of weeding alongside you. You, to your credit, seem to relax as the silence takes over what’s already been said.

“The routine is nice,” he says after a bit, because Fred Weasley has an impossible time staying quiet for too long. You nod in response, and he leaves it alone for a moment to see if you have anything else to say.

“Sorry to…unload like that,” you hedge after a moment. “I know you were just asking, and it’s a bummer to hear about, but I guess…I really miss my family, y’know? Not that the Burrow isn’t great, but I wish I could tell my parents about everything just so they’d tell me how crazy it all is. It feels so odd to think of all of this as normal.”

“You’ll see them again,” Fred reminds you. “This can’t go on for too much longer, can it?”

Fred Weasley learned then not to make promises he couldn’t keep or see through.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

The War does drag on. Far longer than anyone could’ve expected or wanted, even. But the oddest part is that, despite the War, Fred finds himself laughing with you over forced-to-be-stolen Firewhiskey on a late November night.

It’s been months of Order missions and battles and trying to figure out how to buy Harry more time while he’s on the run. It’s been months of planning and scheming and dreaming up ways to throw Death Eaters off the scent of the Golden Trio, months of rewiring neural pathways to say You-Know-Who instead of Voldemort so you’re not discovered at a safe house. And, as Molly Weasley lamented earlier, there hasn’t been much time for children to be children.

He’d jumped in to tell her that you’re not much of children anymore. He doesn’t say this, but the War has aged all of you—he supposes that this was her point, more or less.

George had snuck off with Angelina to the twins’ bedroom, though sneaking seemed to imply that Molly hadn’t all but demanded everyone have a night of normalcy. It also implies that the Firewhiskey the two of you are sharing is anything other than outright given by Molly herself. She’d indulged a bit before bed, but had lamented that she was more of a lightweight than she was at your age before she went to bed. Fred suspects that she’s intentionally giving the pair of you a night alone.

You’re sprawled out on the lawn in a sweater with your initial sewn on the front, made by Molly Weasley for the prior Christmas. You’d saved every variant of the same sweater that she’d knitted you as you’d grown, and this seemed to be the last one you’d need since you’d likely done all of your growing. The moon casts shallow light over the pair of you as you take turns sipping from the bottle, having foregone the pretense of a shot glass after the first few.

“You’re telling me that you’ve never snogged anyone?” Fred asks, incredulous as he tries to tamp down the slur to his speech. You’ve been taking the demand to act normal literally and have spent the evening gossiping like the teenagers you should’ve gotten to be. “Didn’t you date someone for a bit your last year? Harry…”

Fred stops himself a second too late. You sit up abruptly, resting on your knees as you fix Fred with a firm stare. “You’re joking!” You guffaw. “You had Harry reporting Hogwarts gossip to you that year? About me and McLaggen?”

“You went out with McLaggen?” Fred counters, incredulous.

You throw your hands up as laughter stumbles out of you in quick, delighted bursts. “This is why I never said anything!” You argue, though there’s no heat behind your words. You shake your head as a wry smile takes over your features, almost as if you’ve tasted something sour and want to spit it up. “Anyways, it doesn’t matter. He was only taking me out once to see if I’d tell him what his future held and if I was as weird as everyone made me sound.”

Fred starts at that. He can’t help the way that his mouth falls open in shock at this development. It hadn’t been crazy for him to imagine someone like McLaggen taking an interest in you, but it’s devastating for him to realize that you’d been used as nothing more than a crystal ball. He has half the mind to ask you if that had happened before, but he assumes he knows the cruelty that teenage boys are capable of.

“That’s awful,” he says. Then, before he can stop the question, asks, “...What did you tell him about his future?”

“That if he didn’t get the fuck out of my sight he’d be lucky to have one,” you state. “And that I’m not a fortune teller at a Muggle fair, but if I was I wouldn’t have told him anything anyways. His future would’ve been too underwhelming to report on.”

It strikes Fred then that he’s never heard you curse like that before. That’s enough to make him laugh, though it’s tinged with remorse. You’d been too blindsided to make up a prediction to tide McLaggen over, too blindsided to do anything besides curse at him.

“You know anyone would be lucky to have you, right?” Fred asks in a moment of rare earnest truth. He’s not deflecting, there’s no punchline that he’s gearing up towards. You seem a bit thrown off by this, blinking at the sudden serious turn the conversation has taken, looking a bit like a gnome caught in the garden.

You scoff when you get enough of your senses together. “Right,” your tone has soured a bit, and even if he wasn’t looking at you, Fred would know that your eyes are rolling. “Exactly, I know, just like my mum says.”

He sighs. “That’s not what I’m trying to get at here,” he amends. “Even Harry has said—”

“—Harry has his eyes on Ginny, if you haven’t realized?” You seem genuinely confused, and you’re blinking owlishly at him. Fred wants to groan at how difficult this is to say—wasn’t there something to be said for liquid courage?

He draws in a breath and lets it leave him slowly. He closes his eyes and tries to think beyond the haze that the Firewhiskey has muddled him with.

“I’d kiss you, if you wanted.” Fred knows it’s a lousy deflection and thinks that you’ll see straight through it. But when he opens his eyes, he finds hurt in your own.

“This isn’t a very nice joke, Fred,” you announce, moving to stand up as your voice takes on a tight quality that he knows means you’re on the verge of tears. “I’m not…you don’t have to pity me, alright? It’s not a good look on you.”

“I’m not joking!” He urges, his hands reaching for yours in an attempt to get you to sit down. “And I don’t pity you! But, listen, we can forget it, alright? I didn’t…I just meant you could get it over with, if you wanted, and it didn’t have to mean anything.” The words are bitter as he spits them out, a shadowed version of the truth that you deserve.

“Maybe I want it to mean something!” You exclaim, throwing your hands up. Fred’s heart stutters at the declaration, and you must sense it from the way that you rush to add, “My first kiss, I mean.”

Now you’re the one selling a shadow of the truth, but Fred’s not about to call you out on it. What he wants to say is who says it won’t? because he knows that it’s going to change everything. There would be a before and after this moment, stark lines drawn in the sand from where your friendship was to where it will have to go and what it will run into on the way.

“Alright,” he hedges, allowing the topic to die instead of addressing the new elephant in the room. As with everything, he tells himself that there’s going to be another time for this conversation—some time where the War hasn’t consumed you and you’re not drinking Firewhiskey that you’re pretending was stolen.

The greatest lie in War is that there could be more than what you have right now—more moments, more youth, more time.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Time doesn’t come. After your confrontation in the garden, Fred notices that you start to pull away. It isn’t glaringly obvious unless he tries to think of the last time that he’d properly spoken to you, even though you’re living at the Burrow and sleeping in his room. This is the first tragedy.

There’s a gap between you, a divide that he doesn’t know how to cross and close. He wishes he’d never brought up kissing you. He wishes he’d let a sleeping dog lie and keep a good thing that was going for him. It’s better to have you as a friend than to have you as nothing at all.

You, however, see the second tragedy as clearly as you always have. It takes the form of a crumbling wall.

Your gift of Divination wasn’t self-started. You’d been having visions before you knew how to name them, stunning images of things that were yet to come. You dreamed them, more often than not.

Professor Trelawney said the thing about dreams were that they didn’t have to come true. You’d been resolved to keep yours from ever being realized.

Before you knew who he was, you saw flashes of what could be. A smile, a startled laugh, and the resolute stare of a boy who never quite got to taste manhood. Fred once asked you how you could tell him and George apart. You’d told him that it was easy—it was the tone of his voice and the cadence of his words, the way he smiled quicker than George. It was all of those things, admittedly.

The truth, though, was that, had you been anyone else, you’d probably have needed time to tell them apart. You would’ve needed distinction. Instead, the first time you looked at Fred Weasley, the first time you heard his laugh, you knew that he was the person who had haunted your dreams.

You tried to avoid him. You did. You sold him a version of the truth years ago, that you had thought he was going to pull some prank on you, that you’d kept your distance as a protective measure. As it often is, the truth is a more convoluted enterprise. You hadn’t known what to do with the anticipation of grief, of the knowledge that he was here now and might not be at a date to come far sooner than anyone would like. If you’d known how badly he’d be torn up about it, you might have let him know the real reason—or some version of it—a long time ago.

The rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield, you think, even with the added gift of Sight. It’s why you pulled away after the conversation in the garden—you didn’t want to know what you could lose. You didn’t think you’d survive it if you knew what it was like to be allowed to love him and still lose him, as selfish as that thought was.

After many discussions with Professor Trelawney in your youth, you’d been directed to Dumbledore. The visions, as she called them, that you were having were preventable. You’d done it before—you’d been at the right place at the right time to stop a broken glass, a cruel word, or an untimely hex. But those were inconsequential—moments that wouldn’t have destroyed the fabric of an entire family or dropped a spoon from a clock had they occurred.

Dumbledore hadn’t denied that True Sight was rare. Rarer, still, was there so obvious an influence of change to be held. But, he hadn’t denied that what you were seeing wouldn’t occur.

“It’s important that you allow whatever happens to take place if you wish to prevent it from happening,” he’d instructed. “Professor Trelawney isn’t wrong in saying that it seems as though forcing a connection would be to overstep the bounds of what’s to happen and where the choice occurs. I do think, however, it’s important to let it come as close to happening as possible. And I think it imperative that you not alert Mr. Weasley to what could happen.”

You’d hated it at the time. Really, you had. You’d pushed yourself as far away from Fred Weasley as you could. In fact, you made it your mission to stay away from him at all costs. But he hadn’t let that happen. Of course he hadn’t.

You wouldn’t trade the past seven years for anything. For all of the mischief and anguish you’d held at once, you’d never let it cloud what you felt in the moment.

You love Fred Weasley. You would not let him die.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

It comes to a head as all things could—with some form of a Battle.

The Battle of Hogwarts is messy. It’s hard to stay close enough to Fred and George without having them ask you to leave, especially when your recent reticence to spend time with Fred is taken into consideration. If he’s surprised by your sudden change of heart, he doesn’t show it. There isn’t time to address it, either.

You find yourself wand-to-wand with more than a few Death Eaters of note. You’re not sure if they’ve heard about you, though you don’t allow yourself to believe that you’re so important as to be the topic of Death Eater meetings. For all of your success with Potions and Divination, you’re not as good with your fighting. This should’ve crossed your mind before today, before the end of a very long chapter, but it gives you an excuse to stay close to Fred and George.

“Really, you should go to the Great Hall,” Fred urges when there’s a moment of respite, leaning over the ledge of the perch you’ve all found. You’re shaking with the effort to stay standing in front of them, to maintain any sense of normalcy when you’re on edge for what you know is coming.

“Right!” George agrees. “You could help make Potions and treat the wounded, and we’d find you after.”

You shake your head at that. You’re wary of where you’re standing and the sense of deja vu that it gives you—you’ve dreamed this moment enough to know every nook and cranny of it. It feels like you’re standing outside of your body, but you force yourself to go along with it. “Madam Promfrey won’t make a Medi-Witch out of me no matter how hard she tries,” you lament, doing your best to keep your voice steady. “Besides, I think she has enough trouble without me annoying her by asking what she needs.”

When it happens, it’s so quick that you almost miss it. Fred’s smile quirks up at what you’ve said—though you’ll later reckon it wasn’t really funny enough to warrant any sort of reaction, that maybe he was throwing a bone for you to catch and hold onto in an attempt to close the distance between you—just as you feel the wall you’re leaning on begin to shake.

You’re painfully aware of yourself as you watch his mouth move as if to say something else, painfully aware of the way that he’s yet to notice what you’ve spent a lifetime waiting for. You’ve prepared for this moment for the better part of your entire life, and still, you barely find yourself, on edge as you are, with the time to shout, “Reducto!” in a startled scream.

The blocks that should have killed him are reduced to nothing more than ash. The force of your magic has knocked the wind out of you, and you crumple from the energy that it took out of you. You catch Fred’s startled glance, the fear etched into his face that morphs into understanding, before you collapse.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

You wake up to the end of a war. The Great Hall is a medical refuge for the injured and you’re among them. You do not wake slowly, nor is it peaceful. You wake up frightened, bolting with a start to look around the Great Hall. You don’t look to your side, don’t see anything tangible as you gasp his name, “Fred? Fred, oh, Fred?”

It’s a gentle hand pressed to your cheek that reassures you. You grasp the hand with frightening force and look into eyes—alive, no startled laughter etched on the harrowed face of the boy before you—and a sob wretches out of you. “Oh, God, Fred,” you’re gasping for breath, panic ebbing into something tangible behind your ribs that occludes your ability to suck in a full breath. “Oh, Jesus, I…I’ve seen it. I saw it before…before I knew…before…”

You’re gasping the names of Muggle religious figures that he wishes he had taken better notes of when you’d first tried to acquaint him with them. He doesn’t know how to comfort you, it seems, as it all comes crashing down on him. You don’t care if he’s mad. You don’t care if he hates you for keeping this from him if it means that he’s alive to feel it. You’d take a lifetime of knowing who he was without having to hold a candle to the ghost of him—you’d take it all just for the relief of knowing he’s still with George in the store unpacking boxes.

“You knew,” he surmises, no surprise in his voice as his thumb traces a path along your cheekbone. “You’ve seen it—how it could’ve been.”

You’re nodding through your tears. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you,” your voice is trembling as you go to move away from his touch. Better to lose it on your own accord than feel it be retracted, you surmise. Better to have the last touch he ever gives you end because you moved rather than because he took it away.

But he doesn’t let you. He squeezes your cheek to keep you where you are, eyes boring into yours. Oh, his eyes—they’re so alive. The eyes of a boy who gets to become a man. The eyes of a man who didn’t die with the ghost of his last laugh etched into his face.

“...Dumbledore wouldn’t let me,” you go on. “I’m so sorry. I…I’ve been spending seven years trying to figure out how to change it. How to keep it from…how to stop it. I…I never wanted to know you. I didn’t…I didn’t know how to get close. I didn’t know how to stand to lose you.

“It’s why I couldn’t…in the garden. It’s…I knew what was coming and I was too selfish to try and let myself love you while I knew I could lose you.”

Fred’s own choked sob comes tumbling from behind his lips at that. He gets onto your cot with you and tugs you into his arms, and you sit like that for a while in a pile of clumsily assorted limbs. You’re both crying, you think. You, from the relief of saving him and getting to keep him. Him, from the realization of why you spent so long trying not to get close, from the understanding that it was always meant to happen this way.

It’s an eternity later that he lets you go, but his hands don’t leave your cheeks. “I love you,” he says, resolute in his words. Sensing your imminent protest, he goes on before you can cut in. “I’m not saying it because you saved my life, or because you chose to be my friend in spite of this, or because you saw me die and still got close to me. I’ve loved you since we were fourteen. I’ve loved you since you tutored me in Potions and since you let Harry watch over you for my well-being. I don’t love you because you saved my life.

“I love you because you’re my best friend, and because I’ve been too chicken-shit to say it for lesser reasons than you might have had to let yourself feel it, too.”

Your sob is a gasping thing, a visceral reaction that Fred feels in the lurch of your jaw as you try to form a response.

“...This isn’t normally how you want the girl you’ve fancied since you were fourteen to react when you profess your love for her, you know…” He tries the joke on for size, startled by the way it rattles a laugh loose from behind your ribs and gets a smile to crack through the haggard expression you’ve been wearing since you realized he was alive to be angry with you for saving his life.

“Fuck, Fred,” you gasp, still struggling for breath. “I love you, too. How…how could I not?”

He thinks he’ll have to tease the truth of that sentence out someday. He has a life to live, after all. He intends to spend the better part of it figuring out the cosmic forces that drew you to him, but he doesn’t think either of you will make much headway on that front. If he can’t do that, he reasons, he’ll spend the rest of it loving you.

What a frightening concept the rest of a life almost cut short is. What a tender realization it is to know you have the rest of it to breathe in.

ᢉ𐭩ᢉ𐭩ᢉ𐭩

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