Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Gred and Forge

[wemyss]

 

1. There are, George makes certain, thousands of things to say about the Weasley Twins. He can’t imagine there’s anything to say about the surviving half, if you call this survival.
2. Ange insists that he is not an interchangeable substitute for Fred. She believes that. George hopes she’s wrong. Who and what is he if he’s not Fred-and-George both?
3. Because - he knows the others don’t understand - Fred’s still with them, still with him, he is Fred as Fred was George and they one person in two identical bodies.
4. It’s that knowledge that gets him through the day, and the next, and the day after, and keeps him going on with the shop; and the shop is proof of it, and keeps him going.
5. George applauds the fact that the shop’s being the Wizarding QinetiQ is an open secret. It’s good for business, it alarms competitors, and no old Knockturn lag would vary piracy with a spot of burglary at WWW for all the Galleons in Gringotts. But what makes George - and the Ministry - happy is that the reputation of WWW is such that criminals and Dark wizards are forever looking over their shoulders for a falling anvil and flinching at the sight of a perfectly harmless tea cosy. As far as George is concerned, if the worry that There’s Something Dodgy Waiting to Bite Them in the Arse paralyses the buggers for even a few seconds and gives Harry and his lads an edge, all the better.
6. George doesn’t lose any sleep over what happens to the criminally-inclined or the disaffected. When Fred was about, George kept their joint conscience, but even then, all was fair in love and war. Take Montague: by joining Umbridge’s gang, he became an enemy, and was lucky nothing worse befell him than did. Gred and Forge didn’t wait on the Ministry to realise they were at war: they’d been at war since they were born, whether Tom Bloody Riddle was in hiding or not. If throat-slitting, bag-snatching, garrotting, no-witnesses-left SAS-style action behind enemy lines was called for, then it should ruddy well be done.
7. Although George’s manner was the gentler, Fred wasn’t any crueller than his twin: he’d a strict sense of morals. It was simply that theirs was a warrior’s ethos, not those Sunday morals paraded by the spineless buggers who kept their heads down and voted in Fudge and pretended there was no Voldemort.
8. They’d learnt early on the advantages of being underestimated, or dismissed as clowns. Fred wasn’t quite as good at it as was George: he was too readily distracted by a jape, and the tiger showed through too often. George is yet seen as the gentler, kindlier one: which is strategy.
9. Anyone who raises a hand against Harry is swiftly disabused of the idea that George is the Nice One.
10. George, and Fred with him whilst he lived, has played more roles and personæ than all the Unspeakables together: cheeky chappie, licensed fool, chav, spiv, the lot. Masks, all of ’em.
11. They caught on, early on, to the Headmaster’s use of them to test Hogwarts’ defences.
12. When Umbridge was usurping the headship, they ran Dumbledore’s errands.
13. They’d always told him who bought what from the shop; it was Albus Dumbledore’s choice, as part of his plans for Severus and Malfoy and the Headmaster’s own death, to allow the Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder to be sold.
14. No question: as schemers, they acknowledged that Dumbledore was the master of them all in scheming.
15. George is rejoiced that the War is over, high though the price was. It means he needn’t worry about his family, in which include Harry; which means he needn’t kill off any more ill-disposed people with what appear to be toys. And Fred, George maintains, isn’t really gone, after all, not so long as George is about.
16. Were Gred still present in the flesh, Forge reminds people, there’d be twice as much to say; but he isn’t. And that is unforgiveable: and as they were one person in two bodies, that means that George has forgiven neither Weasley Twin for that, and never shall.