The Last Evening

George and I are dancing in our Hogwarts dormitory. Not like a waltz or anything mushy, but a sort of slow paced Charleston. It's the last night we'll be here, and in a way it's scary and relieving. Scary because we've been here for the last seven years of our lives, and it's been our home for the entire length. I feel as safe at Hogwarts as I do in the Burrow's kitchen. For the same reasons it's relieving. It's been seven years of following; well, sort of following, rules; seven years of being coached, striving to do well, and tomorrow we'll be free. Back to being people with free minds, we can stop thinking within the box for a while. We'll come back from being outside the box, but for a year we'll throw our minds to the wind and float for a while. Enjoy some time in freedom.

The music changes, and George switches to a box step, for the hell of it, I think. No one else is in the dorm, the graduates are allowed to run amok on the grounds all night, but somehow it didn't feel right to go run wild with the rest of them. It's a crazy night; Percy went even; but he also came back without some essentially parts of himself. I sometimes think it was the last time he really played, last time he threw his hands up in the air and let himself be free and wild. I think that for a lot of people, that's what this night is about, the last time you get to be a kid.

Somehow, with the opening of our shop later this summer, this night is exactly opposite of that for us. It's the last attempt to be sober, calm, and serious. Still, I know I'm smiling as the tune switches and I begin a quick tango. George falls into perfect step with me, and the room where the bulk of the last seven years has taken place blurs into indistinct colors and shadows. The band plays on. Ben Folds Five I think, an old Muggle band. I've always liked them, and so has George. Suddenly, during a stunning spin, George breaks away and taps the radio. The song switches to something I've never heard, and he flops down on his bed. I continue dancing to the unfamiliar music with an imaginary partner.

I dip the invisible partner, and spin them. I shimmy over to George. "You wouldn't mind if I cut in, would you?"

"Fred..." He sighs, but stands up and takes my imaginary partner as I take his. The two of us are still dancing to the other's lead. As I dip my partner, he actually dips. Finally I cut in and begin dancing with a real live person again. This time it's a completely slow number, not a waltz, but a slow, smooth hip-hop number. I don't generally like hip-hop, but this is good, and the buttery voice of the female singer warms me up from inside out.

"I like this song." George whispers.

"So do I." I whisper back

"Do you think we could stop dancing?"

"Sure, why?"

"I dunno, Fred, just because, maybe."

I sit down on George's bed and lean back. He flops down next to me. We both stare up at the red velvet canopy. It looks the same as mine, except it's bewitched to have a big snarling Gryffindor lion superimposed over the velvet folds. However, the Lion never snarls when it's just the two of us in the dorm. It sleeps, an occasional sigh fluttering all of its sleek muscles and stirring its hair.

George crosses, and uncrosses his arms a few times. I flop up onto my side, and rest my chin in my hand. He is staring up, but he's not seeing anything. "What are you thinking? Surely you aren't upset. You said you wanted to spend the evening here-- back in the dorm."

"Yeah I did, but it's more like I wanted to spend my last few hours at Hogwarts with you. I mean we came here without anyone else, not really. Percy and Bill, and even Charlie were to busy for us that much. And Lee Jordan didn't start right away because he'd gotten sick. And nobody else gave a rip about the two new Weasley Brothers. We didn't come into our own until we were halfway through the second year. It seems like we ought to go out the same way. Spend it in sort of the same way, a nice closure."

I eye George suspiciously. "George, you spent the night in my bed because Nearly Headless Nick scared you senseless."

"I know." He says.

I'm having mixed feelings. "You want to sleep in my bed?" I ask stupidly. "The last time that happened was when we both crashed- just like we are now. Except we were fourteen. We seem a little old to run crying into the other's bed."

He turns his face to me, and his eyes are glazed by a thin layer of tears. "I think I'm sick."

I'm lost, hopelessly lost in what he's going on about. Obviously I'm missing some crucial piece evidence that would tie this together.

"I'm sick in the head." He struggles with the words. "I mean, how can I not be, with the way I feel? Fred, do you love me?"

"More than anything." I say with as much sincerity as I can weight my voice with.

"What would I have to do to ruin that?" He asks.

"Become a Death Eater, kill Ron--wait, maybe not, nasty pesky little brother he is sometimes. I guess it'd be bloody hard." I say.

Suddenly he's swung himself on top of me, his entire weight resting carefully on my lower torso. I reach up to grab him and try toss him off, but he's quicker than I am, and reaches down and brushes my lips with his own. Them suddenly, as if he's ashamed of himself, he jerks back. "Would that change your mind?"

I shut my eyes to think about it, but my mind simply does a couple of replays of what just occurred. I shake my head slowly. "No, I don't think it changes it a bit."

He suddenly collapses against me, and rains kisses down on my shoulders, my neck, whatever available skin there is. It feels like a thousand warm pinpricks, and I burn the feelings into my mind. He finally drops down to my lips again and spends a bit of time getting to know them. I wrap my arms experimentally around his waist, and finding no resistance I pull up the soft wool of his jumper and bring my hands into contact with his skin. The sensation is amazing, the wool and his silky soft skin. My hips buck involuntarily and he stops the delicious things he's doing to my mouth.

"Oh god, this is wrong. Bloody wrong..." He moans after he stands up and shakes his head. "I'm sorry... I need therpathy or whatever it is Muggles call it. Go see a shrink."

"What?" I ask, still dazed by the feelings I'd just swum through.

"I want to bugger my brother. In case you haven't noticed, that's entirely wrong." George says.

"Sure didn't feel wrong."

"It would have. Talk about a terrible morning after... look I'm really not all right in the head at the moment. Give me some time. Some cold water, or something." He bolts from the dorm. This leaves me on the bed thinking that I wouldn't have minded loosing my virginity at Hogwarts anyway. Maybe he isn't the only one here that's been touched--I'm disappointed that I'm not buggering my brother. I get up. Cold water probably really will do the trick.

I get the bathroom and he has the shower on full, and the water is completely frigid. He doesn't seem to mind, and maybe he doesn't. His clothes are soaked through because he didn't bother with taking them off, and the color is beginning to run from his jumper to his gray pants. The water puddles around his cast off shoes. I dash in there and twist the tap to off. "Bloody hell, George, did you want a cold shower or cryogenic freeze?"

"I dunno."

"George, you have got to come off it."

"Fred--"

"Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing horrible happened. Got that?'

"I kissed you!"

"I kissed you back."

"I started it."

"I would have finished it--had it gone its course."

"Fred, I wanted to--"

"Yeah I know." I say as I unfold a towel and hand it to him. "Look, get out of those freezing clothes and calm down."

He gratefully accepts the towel and wipes off his face and hands. He doesn't touch his clothes, and I walk over. I'm not thinking about the implications as I yank the jumper over his head and grab the towel to wrap around his shoulders. I drag him over to the stone bench and sit him down. I kneel down and remove his socks and wad them up with the jumper.

He stares down at the damp sleeves of his jumper's twin. They might have been the same except for the giant F emblazoned on the front of mine and the corresponding G on his. He tugs lightly at the nubby fabric. "You should get out of that too. And I need to change."

"That's the ticket-- get started on thinking right again." I step back and twist the fabric up above my head and it joins the rest of the laundry. It was the wrong thing to do, because suddenly his hands have found their way to the edge of my scrappy T-shirt and he's pulled the white cotton loose from my waistband.

"Am I this beautiful?" He asks.

I glance into the mirror even though I don't need to. I've seen George enough times that I can tell him, that yes, our stomachs are exactly the same.

"Yes, George, you're my twin, you look exactly like me."

"I am your twin." He repeats. "George and Fred, Fred and George, the twins, Forge and Gred. Same person almost, we aren't even separate entities in anybody's mind. Not even our own."

"Can you imagine it being any different? Think of how terribly lonely it would be. Everything you face, you face on your own. Every step of the way it, every triumph, every failure you withstand by yourself. Nobody to understand you completely, no one. How frightening."

"No one to love you absolutely." He says.

"Exactly."

"When did we stop, Fred?"

"Stop what?"

"Stop knowing how much we loved each other, how much we understood each other? When did we start to split into two different people as well as two different bodies?"

"Well, we've always been two people, we are just intimately connected. I don't even think we've grown apart. Grown differently, but not apart."

"So you think we are as close now as when we were eleven year olds who still slept in each other's beds?"

"Yes."

"Still parts of the same whole?"

"Still."

He stands up and gives me a great soppy embrace. He brings his lips up to mine, and drives the connection closer, and closer still. When my bare skin touches his it's a strange electric shock I've never felt before. But certainly, it is not enough. He's right, in the last few years we have forgotten our connections, forgotten to respect them. We've let a paper-thin barrier come between us, and it is too thick despite its translucence. In these times of doubt and uncertainty we have stopped knowing that our connections are there, and have started thinking they are.

"I'm sorry." I whisper into his ear. "I lied--we were infinitesimally farther apart. I never noticed until you brought it up. I think, though, that I've been missing you, been missing being the other part of a whole. I have been lonely, even though you were next to me. I know why now. I was separate from you, and yet, I wasn't complete in and of myself." I say as I grip him even more tightly.

"You and I never will be. Neither of us are complete people."

"But together we aren't just a person."

"No, we're the twins. Fred and George. A whole. Package deal you might say."

I laugh and rest my head on George's shoulder. His hands slip down my back, and further. I'm suddenly being picked up and carried back to the dorm. Somehow the consummation of being whole again doesn't feel wrong, dirty, nor does guilt swell in me either. When the rest of the crew returns, the evidence has been swept away, and George and I are both out of bed, so no one can tell that we slept spooned in my bed. Although we might feel that everything was fine, We doubt that others would view it the same way.

On the Hogwarts Express we laugh and joke in a way we haven't done in years. It's nice to be back together. It's nice to be complete.

It's everything to be whole.