by Muguet au Bois
Molly reached the front door before Ginny or Ron could even rise to intercept with a hushed warning; the enraged mother’s momentum pushing her past both youthful energy and sibling protectiveness.
“George Ignatius Weasley! We were expecting you three hours ago! Do you have any idea how worried--"
George shook his head, rolled his eyes, and slumped into the squashy chair near the fireplace, displacing an irate and howling Crookshanks. “I’m fine. As you can see.”
Molly regarded him for a moment, a breath in-drawn to commence a second round of questioning, but Fleur popped her head in from the Kitchen.
“Muzzer, I cannot tell if zee rolls are feeneesh. Could you tell for me ‘ow zey are doing?”
With a snort, Molly stomped off to the kitchen, muttering frustrated nothings, leaving Fleur to wink at George from the doorway with a little half-smile.
“Thanks,” George mouthed to her before she turned away to follow in her mother-in-law’s irritated wake.
The oppressive silence Molly’s departure left behind wasn’t appreciably better than the tense anticipation of her presence. Fred would have known how to break it. George had no idea himself at the moment, but he briefly considered a juicy fart as a starting gambit. He never was the creative one.
On the sofa, Harry and Ginny sat side by side, two strained lines of tension, not quite touching.
Ron sat in the chair opposite George. Hermione sat on his lap, holding herself with unnaturally straight posture, as if they’d just been caught at something illicit. For the life of him, George couldn’t imagine anything illicit enough to make her look that tense.
Bill sat in the small ladder-back chair by the corner desk, a dripping quill poised over parchment that hadn’t seen a single word’s composition. The ink blotch was large enough that he could cut it out and use it as a novelty eye patch. That’s something he’d need to suggest to Fred “ an eye patch that makes you speak like a pirate, and “
Oh.
Right.
Nobody was breathing.
“What did you think was going to happen to me between Hogwarts and here?” he asked the room at large.
“We didn’t know,” came Arthur’s low, soft voice from the padded bench under the big window.
George couldn’t bring himself to look into his dad’s eyes. "I'm fine."
“You’ve been a little more than fine since this morning, George. You were positively manic during the clean-up in the Great Hall. I was concerned that you would be somewhere other than home when you crashed.”
“I’m home,” George granted.
“Have you?” asked Ron.
“Have I what?”
”Crashed,” Hermione responded.
Examining a small splotch of brownish blood on the left knee of his trousers, he shook his head.
“Were you having a drink?” asked Ginny.
“Do you need a drink?” asked Charlie.
Despite himself, one corner of George’s mouth turned up just a little. “What you got on offer?”
Charlie gave a tense little half-chuckle “ more of a strong exhale through his nose, really “ and looked to their dad. “Where are you hiding the firewhiskey these days?”
Action clearly being the better part of discretion with an underage witch in the house, Arthur simply got up and left the room. Conspicuously, he turned in the exact opposite direction of the strong spirit's last known secret nook.
Ron nodded and rested one temple against Hermione’s cheek. “It’s not a proper wake without firewhiskey.”
An involuntary gasp is all that gave away George’s reaction. The little accompanying tenor grunt demonstrated Hermione’s displeasure with her boyfriend’s characteristic lack of tact.
“t’s fine,” George reassured the room “I haven’t actually forgotten that he’s dead. Kind of hard to.”
He’d expected protests, blurted out apologies, or maybe even a surrogate fart from Charlie, who looked to be examining the braided rug he was sitting on for comeback ideas, but silence returned to the room.
An intrusive clang from the kitchen was a stark reminder that George wasn’t done answering for the missing time. He was supposed to have come directly home from Hogwarts. He’d agreed that the girls could handle closing the shop and doing all the mirror-draping and pointless crap that you’re supposed to do when the proprietor passes on.
Except of course that there was still a proprietor, and his entire family sat waiting to hear his explanation.
“I was at Twilight Alley, okay? I went to see Marcel Daub.”
Bill nodded, as did Ron and Arthur. Charlie sighed. Hermione’s lower lip shook a bit, as if she was biting back tears. Ginny said, “Good.” Harry looked confused.
“Wizard painter,” Ginny whispered to him. “Magical portraits.”
Harry nodded his thanks and whispered back, “They can do that even when the person’s d...not able to sit for it?”
Charlie leaned back against the front of the sofa and muttered over his shoulder to Harry, “That’s how it’s done. Takes a while for it to be ready, and then a little longer for it to get up and running. It’s pretty complex magic.” He turned to George. “Include anything noteworthy?”
George felt some of the tension melt out of him at his family’s acceptance. “Yeah, a trunk. Figured he could pull whatever he wanted out of it, for a bit of fun. Had him add in a closet door and a cupboard or two.”
Ginny’s laugh was a foreign sound, its shattering of the solemn tension nearly offensive at first, until a more amused calm returned to the room, like air to an empty lung. George was immeasurably grateful.
“That’s perfect,” she added. “The best wizard portrait ever. Going to use it to thwart shoplifters?”
George nodded. “Figure he’ll be good for a laugh too. I don’t know where I’d be without his disastrous relationship advice.”
Through a short snicker, Bill added from the side of the room, “You could have a second one made and put it in the heroes’ gallery at Hogwarts. He’d have plenty of company over there.”
“Yeah,” snorted Ron, “and old McGonagall will demand you remove it once he tries to snog all the Victorian ladies and flashes the second year girls.”
“Oh God,” groaned Hermione. “The great mooning portrait of Hogwarts.”
Charlie appeared to like the idea. “Entire generations of kids shouting, ‘Show us your bum, Fred!’”
“Or worse,” Hermione continued, “giving all the naughtiest kids the deepest secrets of the castle. They’d have to keep him in a storage room or something.”
Despite the watery knot that had taken residence in his chest only hours before, George found himself laughing “ a barking, deep-chested laugh that he knew Fred would have mocked.
He farted once, in his brother’s memory, and when Arthur returned with a nearly full bottle of Old Ogden's Finest and a stack of glasses, George got up to pour the drinks.
* * * * *
When George returned to the Wheezes two days later, he found the sign looming over the front door had changed. Carved into the wood, its recessed letters glittering gold, it now read,
Verity had obviously been a great hire.
Inside the shop, he found what had been a large empty stretch of wall “ the wall he’d been thinking of for Daub’s portrait - taken over by a huge blown-up wizard photo of Fred, his eyes X’d over, and his tongue lolling out artificially. Below it, scrawled in Muggle Marker, was the phrase, “Our Founder”.
He’d have to see about a raise for Verity.
Daub’s portrait arrived nine days later, vacant except for the top half of a straight-back chair, a couple of closet doors in the background, a window without curtains, and a large, nondescript trunk boasting a WWW logo and something long and squirming trying to escape from it.
The engraved brass plaque tacked to the gilt frame read:
Dead Fred
1 April 1978 “ 12 May 1998
Immortalized in Song and Story
(and misspelled graffiti in the Hog’s Head loo)
“Worth every galleon,” he told the empty portrait.
The first chilly day in September, a Thursday, when George came downstairs early to do some more niffler testing on the Hiccoughing Horehound, he noticed a change to the portrait.
The chair was no longer empty. Prim, with arms crossed sternly across his chest, sat Fred, his serious expression contradicted only by a very large false nose and spectacles.
“Nice moustache,” George told him.
“Shut it,” Fred responded, continuing to look straight ahead. “I’m being businesslike.”
“Nice time to start.”
Fred’s head tilted down a bit, his own left eyebrow rising above the poufy false one. “Miss me?”
“Like mad, you arsehole,” George muttered on his way back to the workshop.
A little over three hours later, still puzzling over the pastille’s timing problem, George heard the tinkling of the bell on the front door, some murmuring, and the sudden, unexpected voice shouting invective. “Oi! You with the spots and the unnecessarily backdated mullet! Pay for those Nosebleed Nougats or put them back!”
George smiled.
“Have some respect for the dead, you little wanker! I saw you pocket those Super Secret Shoe Silencers!”
Free security was a pretty poor trade for a real live brother, but at least it was something, and his insults seemed as creative as ever. With all the trouble George had been having with the timing charms - Fred's specialty - he'd have to see about getting a second copy of that portrait for the workroom.
-----
http://muguet-au-bois.livejournal.com/