Fred blinked.

Finding himself suddenly on the crest of a mountaintop should have been a terrific shock. The clean white sheet draped over his body should have been perplexing at the least. The breeze that laced through his legs and told him there was nothing underneath the sheet should have been a little disturbing, if secretly enjoyable. But it was the blinking that had him completely gobsmacked.

I…

He paused mid-thought, taking care to pace his assessment of the situation.

am…

But here he stopped; he saw no need to continue deciding what exactly he was, as simply being was enough of a revelation.

“Huh.”

This he spoke aloud, and the breath that flowed through his throat was so warm and tangible that he spoke it again, just to feel his lungs working. He put a hand on his chest, feeling the rhythmic expansion and contraction, the hypnotizing beat of his heart. Then the hand itself caught his attention and he held it up to the sun, examining every ridge of his fingertips, the shine of every nail. Like the back of my hand, he thought curiously. Why did it seem as though he’d never really seen it before?

“Fred? FRED!”

A blur of white sheets and orange hair ran up the mountainside and barreled into him, knocking him to the ground. Triumphant laughter rang in Fred’s ears; he felt his hair being mussed, his shoulders slapped, and a familiar scent, old as the day he was born, struck recognition in his overwhelmed senses.

“George?” he said in disbelief.

The flurry above him slowed and his twin’s face came into focus, beaming with unrestrained delight.

“’Course it’s me! Who’d you expect, Auntie Muriel?” George grinned. Fred just stared upward in a daze and George’s brow furrowed with concern. “Hey, you all right? You haven’t gone, you know… zombie, have you?”

“No, it’s just…” Fred shook his head in shock. Despite the thrill of seeing George again, he hadn’t wanted to see him like this. “Mum’s going to go round the bend.”

George cocked his head to the side in puzzlement, and then laughed. “No, I’m not dead! There’s no fighting anymore; we won the war months ago.”

“Months? But I’ve been here…” Fred frowned, realizing even as he spoke that he didn’t know how to apply the concept of time here. Somehow it felt so much longer than months, far longer than he’d ever been alive, but at the same time, it felt like he’d never left his twin’s side. Then there was the even more puzzling question. “If you’re not dead, then how did you get here? And for that matter, how did I get here?”

George grinned and thrust his chest out a little as he announced what he had clearly been eager to say all along. “I made a deal to bring you back to life! Sort of…”

Fred’s jaw dropped. After a couple of unsuccessful tries to get it working again, he managed to stammer, “Back? Deal? Sort of?”

“Don’t worry about the details.” George waved his hands with merry unconcern. “The important thing is that you get a second chance! You get to come back to Earth with me right now! And not a moment too soon; Merlin knows Ron needs twice as much teasing about Hermione as I can give him.”

“But… how?” Fred insisted. “No one can, no one’s ever been able to.”

George grinned and wagged his finger. “Not entirely true, dear brother. There are certain arrangements that can be made, favors that can be asked, given the right circumstances. You hadn’t moved on yet, for one. If you had, I never would have been able to reach you. And it also only works for twins, no one else. It’s a very obscure ritual; Luna helped me out with all the details. You know, when you want something crazy done, it helps to have someone crazy to see you through it.”

Fred held up his hands for George to stop; he hadn’t really thought in a long time and the influx was overwhelming. “I… I still don’t get it. There’s no magic that can bring anyone back, moved on or not. Not even the darkest wizards have ever been able to manage it!”

“This wasn’t magic, mate. It wasn’t wizards.” George’s voice dropped reverently and his eyes darted over his shoulders before he whispered, “It was the gods.”

“Gods?” Fred repeated in an identical whisper. “Which ones?”

George smiled mysteriously and winked. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Let’s just say I’ve learned far more about the Dioskouroi than I ever wanted to.”

“Gods,” Fred said again in amazement, and he found himself superstitiously glancing above his head too. “And they’re going to let me come back? Just like that?”

“Well, there’s a small catch,” George hedged, and Fred could see the tension rise in his brother’s shoulders. “They’re not really in the habit of handing out life for free, but what they’ll do is let us share.”

“Share?” Fred suddenly got a very heavy feeling in his stomach.

“It’s nothing!” George insisted. “Not much, anyway. The deal is that you get to come back to Earth with me today, but tomorrow we’ll have to go back to death together. We’ll get to come back again the next day, though!” he hastily added. “But that’s how we’ll spend the rest of our life, alternating.”

“You mean… you have to die to bring me back?” Fred said in a hollow voice.

“No!” George shook his head irritably. “I figured you’d get hung up on that part, but it’s not really like dying. It’s more like… sleeping in really, really late every morning.”

He gave Fred an expectant half-smile, watching for his reaction, but after seeing it, he began to look nervous for the first time.

“We’ll still have a whole lifetime, Fred,” he said more urgently. “We’re not going to miss out on anything! We’ll just have to do a bit more scheduling, hire more help for the shop, find girls who don’t mind a little time to themselves. That’s such a small price to pay for you to live again. Don’t think about it, just come with me.”

George held out his hand, but Fred just stared at it, curling his own fingers and imagining the touch of death inside of them, like the Grim Reaper. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” George demanded.

“I won’t come back like this! I’m not going to take half your life away from you!”

George glared at him wordlessly, then his face crumbled and for a moment Fred saw the pain of betrayal that he’d never inflicted on his twin before. “You already did.”

Fred looked away. He couldn’t face the pain that he’d caused George; it was the same terrible emptiness that had kept him clinging to earth when his time came to let go. He knew every emotion in George’s heart like it was his own, and likewise he was sure that George knew what he was going to say next. But he would say it anyway.

“George…”

“Don’t.”

“George, you know this isn’t right.”

George snapped his head up, pain replaced with anger, and yelled, “There’s nothing right about any of this! It wasn’t right for you to die and it’s not wrong for you to come back! And even if it were, who cares? Why’d you have to choose now to start following rules?”

Fred didn’t know what to say; he couldn’t think of a single rational argument against coming back. Every other day, he told himself. Like sleeping in really late. It’s nothing; it’s such a small price to pay… But still he couldn’t bring himself to take his twin’s hand.

Fred turned his head up toward the sky and let the sun burn his face through the thin mountain air. When his cheeks were tingling with a low fire and his eyes throbbing under their lids, he let out a long breath and looked back down again. George was watching him.

“You want to come back,” he stated flatly. “If you didn’t, you would have moved on already.”

Fred nodded. He touched his cheek; the last pinpricks of heat had already dissipated from his skin. “I think… I think I just wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

George screwed his mouth into a tight, trembling line and nodded once. Shoulders slumped, he stared at the ground for a long time, and when he lifted his head, his cheeks were wet. “I burned an ox to get you here. An entire ox, fur and all. Do you have any idea how bad that smelled?”

“I can imagine,” Fred smiled. “You know, if our positions were reversed, I’d have done the same for you.”

“Yeah, and I would have come with you instead of being a damn prat about it,” George muttered.

Fred laughed and shook his head. He didn’t believe that, but there was no sense arguing about it now. He’d made his decision and it was time to face it. “You should go,” he said gently.

George looked at him helplessly. “What am I supposed to tell everyone?”

That stopped Fred for a moment; he never thought he’d be in the position to dole out last messages and he felt rather unprepared. He considered “I love you,” but he knew his family already knew that. And “I’m sorry” didn’t seem appropriate, even though he did feel some lingering guilt for his decision.

“Tell them goodbye,” he finally said.

George nodded roughly and turned his face away to wipe his eyes once more. Though Fred’s heart ached with his, he couldn’t cry with him now, not for this. “You’ll be okay,” he said quietly. “You’ll all be okay.”

George rolled his eyes and muttered, with a small smile, “Ponce.”

Fred chuckled. “Git.”

“Quitter.”

“Cry-baby.”

George gave him a grudging smile and made a show of flicking his last tear away. His eyes dried, he gestured into the distance over Fred’s shoulder. “Give ‘em hell from me.”

Fred grinned and drew his brother into a hug, the kind they claimed to have outgrown when they were nine. “You too, mate.”

Drawing back, they looked at each other for one moment more, then turned away from their mirror images and walked off in opposite directions.