Back and Forth (And Forth and Back)
Title: Back and Forth (And Forth and Back)
Characters: George, Fred, Molly (gen)
Word Count: ~2200
Rating: PG
Summary: The logical thing, then, is to separate them.
Warnings: Canon character death. Angst.
Notes: I wrote this for the fabulous deathjunke for this round of hpgeorgecentric. Lots of love and thanks to my fantastic beta, starstruck1986, who is unfailingly helpful and brilliant, and who made this much more acceptable. You're the best ♥
MID-JUNE, 1985
The first time George says the words I hate you, he is seven years old, and he says them to his mother.
This is also the first time that Molly is rendered speechless by one of her children. And Molly has seven children.
It isn't so much the words that do it - though they feel like a Stunning spell right to her heart, she knows that George is a child and cannot possibly mean them - it's the look on his face. By now, she has weathered innumerable tantrums, tears, screaming matches, even duels, but she has never seen one of her babies look at her like this: as though she has just cut his heart right out of his chest and spat upon it, or like she has just set him out somewhere to die.
She has not done either of these things, though the truth is that she may have been half-tempted. They are six days away from her cousin's wedding, and Ginny, who is to be the flower girl, is now bald. Not only is the hair on top of her head missing, but her eyelashes and eyebrows have been Vanished, as well, as has the fine, pale downy hair that formerly covered her four year-old arms and legs. Her daughter is as hairless as an egg, and her twin sons are responsible. The potion to re-grow the hair takes a full month to restore it to its former condition, and Ginny has been howling in rage for over an hour.
So has Molly.
But it isn't the howling that has drawn the hateful words from George's mouth, and it isn't the red spoon-mark across his bottom that has put that terrible, wounded, dagger-to-the-gut expression on his face. No. Her son is flesh-and-blood Trouble; a happy little hellion with thick skin and a resilient heart. He can dish out, along with Fred, more mischief in an hour than the rest of them combined can manage in a month, but he can also take his punishments with a stoic pout and a twinkle in his eye.
All of his punishments, apparently, except for this one. This is different.
The Vanishing of Ginny's hair has been, like most of their exploits, a team effort. However, unlike most of their rebellions, one of them, alone, could not have managed half the task. It unequivocally required two brains, four hands, and not one, but two nicked wands (Bill and Charlie are currently serving time degnoming the garden as penance for ignoring their mother's impassioned pleas to monitor their wands.)
The logical thing, then, is to separate them.
Different meal times.
Different sleeping arrangements.
Different bath times.
Different housework tasks.
Under individual guard, both of them, until the wedding. No exceptions.
Molly has had enough.
And her son hates her. At least, he thinks he does. His face is red with fury, and his little hands are clenched into fists, and the look. It’s the look that steals Molly's voice and causes her heart to beat erratically and drains the blood from her body. She gapes at George, who thinks that this new power lies in the words and not the expression, and says them again.
"I hate you."
They square off in the kitchen, eye-to-eye. Molly has never seen her twin sons look so different. George is so red that Molly is worried that he might faint dead away, and Fred is as pale as a snowdrift. George's freckles are lost in the sea of rage across his cheeks, and Fred's stand out like white stars on black sky. The emotion has been wiped clean from Fred's face, and George looks like he can't decide whether to kill her or to cry.
In her concern, Molly tries to send Fred away - "Now go help your brothers in the garden!" - but he won't move. He's staring at George, too, wide-eyed and truly, truly sorry for what might be the very first time in his short life.
"Go!" Molly hollers again, and she feels her heart wrench in her chest when Fred reaches for George's hand and squeezes it before glaring at his mother and bolting out the door, uncharacteristically silent.
Alone now with George in the kitchen, Molly tries to be firm and fair. She finds her voice and says, "I know you're angry, but if you two can't behave when you're together, then…"
George cuts her off by screaming, "Shut up!" and bursting into tears.
For the next three days, her boisterous, beautiful son is sullen and cross and as hollow as the ghoul in the attic, who has, in the absence of the usual chattering chaos of the Burrow, seemed to grow louder and louder to fill the void.
Molly doesn't sleep well. She spends her nights back and forth between the twins' room, where Fred and Charlie are sleeping, and the older boys', which Bill is sharing with George. Bill and Charlie snore peacefully. Fred lies on his belly pretending to sleep, and George glares at her through the gloom, his arms butterflied behind his head. Both of them, probably, imagine that she is wandering the house to make sure that they stay put.
She feels like the worst mother who has ever lived, though her husband pets her hair and assures her that they will get over it, that this is good for them, that she is brilliant and loving and fair. "Seven is a moody age," he says gently, but while seven is a moody age, George is not a moody child.
By the third night, Molly cannot take it any longer.
She pulls her dressing gown around herself and knots the belt, then pads up to where Bill and George are tucked away. George - who has not spoken a word to her in days - chews at his lip, curled into a ball atop the duvet. It is summer, and he is shirtless and sweating and seething.
Molly sits beside him, silent. She reaches for an errant lock of hair the same colour as her own and moves it out of his eyes. Something about this gesture relaxes him almost imperceptibly, and it gives her a glimmer of hope. "You miss Freddie, don’t you, love?" she says, now laying her palm across his cheek.
George nods, and Molly brushes her thumb under his eye. He isn't crying.
Wordlessly, he pushes himself up onto his knees and crawls into her lap, resting his messy head against her shoulder. "Sorry Mummy," he whispers, and his breath is hot and sweet and just about the most beautiful thing she has ever felt against her skin.
She covers his face with kisses - eyelids and earlobes and jawbone and temples - and rocks him against her until he starts to rock, too, back and forth and forth and back, by the funny, warm light of Molly's wand.
After a few moments, she rises to her feet, and George clings to her neck like a ganglier version of his three year-old self. He is growing long and lean and coltish, and he does not fit as neatly in her arms as he once did. It doesn't matter. She carries him anyway, breathing against the back of his neck, both surprised and comforted by the fact that he still smells the way he did as a toddler, like moss and earth and sleep.
When they get to the door of the bedroom he usually shares with Fred, Molly pushes it open. A small shadow hunkers down close to the bedclothes, and Molly laughs. "I know you're awake, Freddie, sweetheart. It's all right. You aren’t in trouble. Sit up."
Fred's eyes open, and he sees his brother, and he sits straight-up like it's Christmas morning. Molly perches on the edge of his bed and settles George across one knee. Fred is bouncing up and down on the mattress, and Molly doesn't have the heart to tell him to stop. Without a second thought, Fred crawls onto her other knee, and Molly sees George smile for the first time in three days.
They start whispering straight away, as though they have a lifetime of news to share, but Molly doesn't really listen. She wraps an arm around each of their waists and ponders all of the ways in which she will never really understand them. They came from her body; they are made from her flesh and from her husband's; they share her home and her table and her life and her heart. But they do not belong to her. They baffle her and startle her and amaze her; they make her laugh and make her cry and make her proud; they infuriate her and challenge her, and sometimes, in their intensity, maybe even frighten her a little - not that she would ever say it aloud. Children, after all, can smell fear.
But they do not belong to her. Not really.
She kisses them both, sloppy wet lip-prints on their matching cheeks, and, rather than wake Charlie - because waking Charlie is nearly as dangerous as waking a dragon, she has discovered - tucks them side-by-side into Fred's bed, where they curl up like puppies in a basket.
_______________
EARLY MAY, 1998
Molly crouches on the ground beside her son and gently lowers herself into the dirt. It is nine o'clock in the morning, and George has been here since eleven the day before, when the last bit of earth was patted into place. From her bag, Molly removes a wrapped bacon sandwich and presses it into his open palm.
"Georgie," she says quietly, her voice soft and concerned.
"Mum," he replies, laying the sandwich in his lap and leaning back against the cool smoothness of his brother's tombstone. He closes his eyes, which are red-ringed and sunken-in, and wets his chapped-looking lips.
"Georgie, you'll burn to…" She almost says death, but stops herself.
George takes mercy on her and interrupts her. "Charlie's been by," he says. "Charmed me so I won't burn. Something he learned at the reservation. Working so far." His voice is listless, like he doesn't care whether it works or not, and Molly cannot ever remember him sounding like this.
"When…"
"This morning. After Ron left. He spent the night."
"Ron spent…"
"Yes." George still has not opened his eyes. "They're taking shifts, or something. I don't know."
Molly reaches into his lap and unwraps the sandwich, smoothing the paper across his trousers. Beside him, his dress robes are in a rumpled pile, and his wand is tossed haphazardly atop them. Fred's wand is poking out of the neck of his shirt, slanting across his heart with the tip of it resting against the freckled skin of his collarbone.
Because she does not know what else to do - because she cannot pick him up and carry him to his brother's bed this time; because she cannot tuck the blankets around them and soothe them into a wriggling tangle of limbs - she picks the sandwich apart and puts piece after piece against his lips until he opens for her and chews obediently.
"Eat," she says, and he does.
When it's gone, she leans back against the stone beside him and lets her head fall against his, being careful of the spot where his ear used to be. She wonders if that is what his heart looks like now, too: jagged-edged and gaping, an un-healable wound, a mouth opened forever in silent grief. The terror of this is so profound that she cannot even contemplate it.
Instead, she whispers, "That's the first time you've listened to me in twenty years."
George's dry lips try to smile, but it looks like a grimace. "What else is there to do now, Mum, but listen?"
"I'm sorry, Georgie," she says after a moment. "Do you remember when you were seven, and you and Freddie... and Ginny's hair, and…" Somehow, she can't even bring herself to name the punishment. It is one that she never used again, not even in her worst moments. Or in theirs.
George nods.
"I'm sorry." Her voice is tight and thin, rising into the pitch of tears, and George stretches his arm behind her and pulls her close.
She sobs against his solid body. His face is still, and he pats his big hand against her side over and over and over. "Shhhhh," he whispers, and it sounds like the wind.
It goes on like this for twenty minutes, until finally her cries fade and there is a wet spot making a patch of George's white shirt transparent. "It's all right, Mum," he says when she is calm enough to hear his quiet voice. "I would've done the same thing if I were you, likely enough. I'm sorry we were so rotten."
"You were never…"
"We were always," George says, and the grimace-smile returns. "Always."
Molly scoots sideways and opens her arms. "You miss Freddie, don't you, love?" she says after a long moment, tilting her head to look up at her son who, even sitting, towers over her now. She cups his cheek in her palm and runs her thumb under his haunted-looking eye. This time, he's crying.
George nods, then lets himself fall sideways into her. She heaves him into her lap, and he is seven years old again, curled as small as he will go, his face - scruffy now; itchy on her skin - against her neck, his hands gripping at her skirt, his broad man's shoulders shaking and shaking and shaking, and together they sit and rock and sit and rock and listen to the silence.
Characters: George, Fred, Molly (gen)
Word Count: ~2200
Rating: PG
Summary: The logical thing, then, is to separate them.
Warnings: Canon character death. Angst.
Notes: I wrote this for the fabulous deathjunke for this round of hpgeorgecentric. Lots of love and thanks to my fantastic beta, starstruck1986, who is unfailingly helpful and brilliant, and who made this much more acceptable. You're the best ♥
MID-JUNE, 1985
The first time George says the words I hate you, he is seven years old, and he says them to his mother.
This is also the first time that Molly is rendered speechless by one of her children. And Molly has seven children.
It isn't so much the words that do it - though they feel like a Stunning spell right to her heart, she knows that George is a child and cannot possibly mean them - it's the look on his face. By now, she has weathered innumerable tantrums, tears, screaming matches, even duels, but she has never seen one of her babies look at her like this: as though she has just cut his heart right out of his chest and spat upon it, or like she has just set him out somewhere to die.
She has not done either of these things, though the truth is that she may have been half-tempted. They are six days away from her cousin's wedding, and Ginny, who is to be the flower girl, is now bald. Not only is the hair on top of her head missing, but her eyelashes and eyebrows have been Vanished, as well, as has the fine, pale downy hair that formerly covered her four year-old arms and legs. Her daughter is as hairless as an egg, and her twin sons are responsible. The potion to re-grow the hair takes a full month to restore it to its former condition, and Ginny has been howling in rage for over an hour.
So has Molly.
But it isn't the howling that has drawn the hateful words from George's mouth, and it isn't the red spoon-mark across his bottom that has put that terrible, wounded, dagger-to-the-gut expression on his face. No. Her son is flesh-and-blood Trouble; a happy little hellion with thick skin and a resilient heart. He can dish out, along with Fred, more mischief in an hour than the rest of them combined can manage in a month, but he can also take his punishments with a stoic pout and a twinkle in his eye.
All of his punishments, apparently, except for this one. This is different.
The Vanishing of Ginny's hair has been, like most of their exploits, a team effort. However, unlike most of their rebellions, one of them, alone, could not have managed half the task. It unequivocally required two brains, four hands, and not one, but two nicked wands (Bill and Charlie are currently serving time degnoming the garden as penance for ignoring their mother's impassioned pleas to monitor their wands.)
The logical thing, then, is to separate them.
Different meal times.
Different sleeping arrangements.
Different bath times.
Different housework tasks.
Under individual guard, both of them, until the wedding. No exceptions.
Molly has had enough.
And her son hates her. At least, he thinks he does. His face is red with fury, and his little hands are clenched into fists, and the look. It’s the look that steals Molly's voice and causes her heart to beat erratically and drains the blood from her body. She gapes at George, who thinks that this new power lies in the words and not the expression, and says them again.
"I hate you."
They square off in the kitchen, eye-to-eye. Molly has never seen her twin sons look so different. George is so red that Molly is worried that he might faint dead away, and Fred is as pale as a snowdrift. George's freckles are lost in the sea of rage across his cheeks, and Fred's stand out like white stars on black sky. The emotion has been wiped clean from Fred's face, and George looks like he can't decide whether to kill her or to cry.
In her concern, Molly tries to send Fred away - "Now go help your brothers in the garden!" - but he won't move. He's staring at George, too, wide-eyed and truly, truly sorry for what might be the very first time in his short life.
"Go!" Molly hollers again, and she feels her heart wrench in her chest when Fred reaches for George's hand and squeezes it before glaring at his mother and bolting out the door, uncharacteristically silent.
Alone now with George in the kitchen, Molly tries to be firm and fair. She finds her voice and says, "I know you're angry, but if you two can't behave when you're together, then…"
George cuts her off by screaming, "Shut up!" and bursting into tears.
For the next three days, her boisterous, beautiful son is sullen and cross and as hollow as the ghoul in the attic, who has, in the absence of the usual chattering chaos of the Burrow, seemed to grow louder and louder to fill the void.
Molly doesn't sleep well. She spends her nights back and forth between the twins' room, where Fred and Charlie are sleeping, and the older boys', which Bill is sharing with George. Bill and Charlie snore peacefully. Fred lies on his belly pretending to sleep, and George glares at her through the gloom, his arms butterflied behind his head. Both of them, probably, imagine that she is wandering the house to make sure that they stay put.
She feels like the worst mother who has ever lived, though her husband pets her hair and assures her that they will get over it, that this is good for them, that she is brilliant and loving and fair. "Seven is a moody age," he says gently, but while seven is a moody age, George is not a moody child.
By the third night, Molly cannot take it any longer.
She pulls her dressing gown around herself and knots the belt, then pads up to where Bill and George are tucked away. George - who has not spoken a word to her in days - chews at his lip, curled into a ball atop the duvet. It is summer, and he is shirtless and sweating and seething.
Molly sits beside him, silent. She reaches for an errant lock of hair the same colour as her own and moves it out of his eyes. Something about this gesture relaxes him almost imperceptibly, and it gives her a glimmer of hope. "You miss Freddie, don’t you, love?" she says, now laying her palm across his cheek.
George nods, and Molly brushes her thumb under his eye. He isn't crying.
Wordlessly, he pushes himself up onto his knees and crawls into her lap, resting his messy head against her shoulder. "Sorry Mummy," he whispers, and his breath is hot and sweet and just about the most beautiful thing she has ever felt against her skin.
She covers his face with kisses - eyelids and earlobes and jawbone and temples - and rocks him against her until he starts to rock, too, back and forth and forth and back, by the funny, warm light of Molly's wand.
After a few moments, she rises to her feet, and George clings to her neck like a ganglier version of his three year-old self. He is growing long and lean and coltish, and he does not fit as neatly in her arms as he once did. It doesn't matter. She carries him anyway, breathing against the back of his neck, both surprised and comforted by the fact that he still smells the way he did as a toddler, like moss and earth and sleep.
When they get to the door of the bedroom he usually shares with Fred, Molly pushes it open. A small shadow hunkers down close to the bedclothes, and Molly laughs. "I know you're awake, Freddie, sweetheart. It's all right. You aren’t in trouble. Sit up."
Fred's eyes open, and he sees his brother, and he sits straight-up like it's Christmas morning. Molly perches on the edge of his bed and settles George across one knee. Fred is bouncing up and down on the mattress, and Molly doesn't have the heart to tell him to stop. Without a second thought, Fred crawls onto her other knee, and Molly sees George smile for the first time in three days.
They start whispering straight away, as though they have a lifetime of news to share, but Molly doesn't really listen. She wraps an arm around each of their waists and ponders all of the ways in which she will never really understand them. They came from her body; they are made from her flesh and from her husband's; they share her home and her table and her life and her heart. But they do not belong to her. They baffle her and startle her and amaze her; they make her laugh and make her cry and make her proud; they infuriate her and challenge her, and sometimes, in their intensity, maybe even frighten her a little - not that she would ever say it aloud. Children, after all, can smell fear.
But they do not belong to her. Not really.
She kisses them both, sloppy wet lip-prints on their matching cheeks, and, rather than wake Charlie - because waking Charlie is nearly as dangerous as waking a dragon, she has discovered - tucks them side-by-side into Fred's bed, where they curl up like puppies in a basket.
_______________
EARLY MAY, 1998
Molly crouches on the ground beside her son and gently lowers herself into the dirt. It is nine o'clock in the morning, and George has been here since eleven the day before, when the last bit of earth was patted into place. From her bag, Molly removes a wrapped bacon sandwich and presses it into his open palm.
"Georgie," she says quietly, her voice soft and concerned.
"Mum," he replies, laying the sandwich in his lap and leaning back against the cool smoothness of his brother's tombstone. He closes his eyes, which are red-ringed and sunken-in, and wets his chapped-looking lips.
"Georgie, you'll burn to…" She almost says death, but stops herself.
George takes mercy on her and interrupts her. "Charlie's been by," he says. "Charmed me so I won't burn. Something he learned at the reservation. Working so far." His voice is listless, like he doesn't care whether it works or not, and Molly cannot ever remember him sounding like this.
"When…"
"This morning. After Ron left. He spent the night."
"Ron spent…"
"Yes." George still has not opened his eyes. "They're taking shifts, or something. I don't know."
Molly reaches into his lap and unwraps the sandwich, smoothing the paper across his trousers. Beside him, his dress robes are in a rumpled pile, and his wand is tossed haphazardly atop them. Fred's wand is poking out of the neck of his shirt, slanting across his heart with the tip of it resting against the freckled skin of his collarbone.
Because she does not know what else to do - because she cannot pick him up and carry him to his brother's bed this time; because she cannot tuck the blankets around them and soothe them into a wriggling tangle of limbs - she picks the sandwich apart and puts piece after piece against his lips until he opens for her and chews obediently.
"Eat," she says, and he does.
When it's gone, she leans back against the stone beside him and lets her head fall against his, being careful of the spot where his ear used to be. She wonders if that is what his heart looks like now, too: jagged-edged and gaping, an un-healable wound, a mouth opened forever in silent grief. The terror of this is so profound that she cannot even contemplate it.
Instead, she whispers, "That's the first time you've listened to me in twenty years."
George's dry lips try to smile, but it looks like a grimace. "What else is there to do now, Mum, but listen?"
"I'm sorry, Georgie," she says after a moment. "Do you remember when you were seven, and you and Freddie... and Ginny's hair, and…" Somehow, she can't even bring herself to name the punishment. It is one that she never used again, not even in her worst moments. Or in theirs.
George nods.
"I'm sorry." Her voice is tight and thin, rising into the pitch of tears, and George stretches his arm behind her and pulls her close.
She sobs against his solid body. His face is still, and he pats his big hand against her side over and over and over. "Shhhhh," he whispers, and it sounds like the wind.
It goes on like this for twenty minutes, until finally her cries fade and there is a wet spot making a patch of George's white shirt transparent. "It's all right, Mum," he says when she is calm enough to hear his quiet voice. "I would've done the same thing if I were you, likely enough. I'm sorry we were so rotten."
"You were never…"
"We were always," George says, and the grimace-smile returns. "Always."
Molly scoots sideways and opens her arms. "You miss Freddie, don't you, love?" she says after a long moment, tilting her head to look up at her son who, even sitting, towers over her now. She cups his cheek in her palm and runs her thumb under his haunted-looking eye. This time, he's crying.
George nods, then lets himself fall sideways into her. She heaves him into her lap, and he is seven years old again, curled as small as he will go, his face - scruffy now; itchy on her skin - against her neck, his hands gripping at her skirt, his broad man's shoulders shaking and shaking and shaking, and together they sit and rock and sit and rock and listen to the silence.