Dead Twin Walking

Epilogue: Mischief Managed

"Someday out of the blue
Maybe years from now
Or tomorrow night
I'll turn and I'll see you
As if we always knew
Someday we would live again,
Someday soon..."
-"Someday Out of the Blue" (Elton John)

"Fred? FRED!!"

"Huh?" Dazed, Fred looked up into the green eyes that mirrored his own. The eyes of his dearest friend and partner in crime, the twin brother he'd known all his life. ...Or had he? "You say something, George?"

George, who had been shaking his brother by the shoulders, let go and sat back down beside him. "You've been out of it for the past ten minutes! You all right?"

Fred shook his head to clear it. "Fine, but I just had the weirdest dream..." But had it all been a dream? It had seemed a little too real for his taste. And why would he daydream about such things out of nowhere when ten minutes prior he had felt fully awake and alert? By now, the twins were quite used to staying up late between mischief and resulting detentions. Something was wrong with this picture.

George raised an eyebrow at that. "A dream? What kind of dream?"

Fred paused for a few moments to compose his answer. It had all happened so fast, and he had trouble making sense of it all. Not that it had made much sense to begin with. Growing up without George... finding and meeting him for the "first" time after eleven long years... the truth behind their separation... painful loss... a time turner... None of that had ever happened, so why had he dreamt it? The Divination teacher might know, but he wouldn't have electives such as that for another two years.

And as he tried to figure them out, the visions started fading away into nothing. He tried to mentally grasp at them, keep them from disappearing, but it was no use. True, some of them had been less than pleasant, but they had to have happened for a reason. In less than a minute they were gone, and with them virtually all recollection of their existence, leaving Fred even more confused.

"Well? What was the dream about?" George was a bit concerned at his twin's uncharacteristic lack of a quick, witty response.

"It... it was nothing, really." Since the visions had vanished as mysteriously as they had come, it technically wasn't a lie.

A devious smile crossed his brother's face as he wrongly guessed what Fred had been dreaming about. "It was about your girlfriend, Angelina, wasn't it? The two of you were snogging up in the Astronomy Tower, that's why you don't want to tell me!"

"No, it bloody well wasn't!" Fred snapped indignantly. He was sure he would have remembered something like that. "And Angelina's not my girlfriend!" Not yet, anyway...

"Suuuure she isn't," George replied teasingly. But before Fred could argue the point further, Lee Jordan leaned into the portrait hole of the Gryffindor Common Room, where the twins had been plotting alone. Only now did Fred remember what they had been up to prior to him passing out.

"You two ready? McGonagall's just left her office," Lee asked his fellow First Years and best friends.

Matching devilish grins spread across the twins' faces as they rose to their feet. "Excellent," they said in unison, and followed Lee out.

*Fin*

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Final Notes: Well, that's it folks! Figured I'd leave their little escapade up to the imagination. And for the record, I meant for the "dream" bit here to be a residual effect of the merging timelines, not the old "It was all a dream" cliché.