beatniks are out to make it rich
title: crushed beneath the delicate weight of a piano that tumbles from heaven (alternately titled: the tragicomedy of weasley blood)
author: marvolo
pairing: fred/george, george/hermione, fred/hermione.
dedication: this is for miss catja, who has more faith in my writing ability than she really should. <3
notes: aaagh, weasleycest! hello, fandom, it's been forever. here's hoping i'm not too awfully rusty.
x
identical twins are formed when one (1) egg is released, and it is fertilized by one (1) sperm. At some point after fertilization, the egg splits in two genetically identical halves. Identical twins are always of the same sex. They share all genes. also see: conjoined twins; fraternal twins; multiple births -- Professor Zigfield's Encyclopedia of Medical Wonders, found in the study of Arthur Weasley
x
Identical is a relative word. When Fred hears it, he imagines parallel lines, two evenly measured angles. Two perfect outlines that fit up just right with nothing to spare. One of his mother's cookie cutters, punching out gingerbread men, all exactly the same, down to the dips in their frosted smiles.
To Fred, identical is not the word that describes being a twin.
He looks at George and he knows that they are not the same, through and through. Their blood might be the same, it might have the same complexities that only a mediwizard would be able to understand, but their bones are not the same. Two different hearts, beating at different times, made for such different things that they'd never line up together.
One afternoon, Fred catalogues the little differences he's noticed, while idly scribbling pictures of arrows on the back of one of Ginny's school notebooks. They're all fairly obvious, but they're the sort of thing no one would notice unless they were looking for the differences. Which no one ever did.
George has a wider smile, and a lower voice, and hands a quarter of an inch longer. He can wear the color yellow, roll his tongue, and bend his left thumb backwards. When George picks up a magazine, he reads it back to front; when standing very long, he folds his arms.
Fred mimics these mannerisms at times, when the two of them are playing some prank and pretending to be each other. Sometimes even when they aren't, just so he can try and smudge out the fact that there really are differences. He wonders when he does this: what would happen if I just stopped trying to draw the gaps closed? what would happen if I stopped taking up the slack?
He knows, though, that this won't happen. That's why they're twins in the first place, you see. George is the boy who always pulls away, and Fred comes tumbling after.
x
Fred was thirteen when he and George first kissed; it was the first Ministry event either of them had attended. Arthur (Dad) had recently received an unexpected promotion, and thus was in very good humor when the invitations to the Minister's Christmas ball were handed out. In such good humor, as it seemed, that he decided to bring all available children over the age of eleven (the twins; Percy) to the event, and Molly (Mum) bought them each a set of nice robes to wear.
That's what they're wearing when they looked at the Christmas tree in the Fudges' ballroom antechamber. It's about as tall as three men standing on each other's shoulders, and covered in popcorn strings and bored-looking fairies sitting here and there, patting their hair and glowing among the needles.
Fred had walked into the room first, and when George trailed in, Fred was prodding at one of the fairies with the tip of his finger.
"Don't," George protested. "You'll hurt her."
The fairy slapped at Fred's fingertip and huffed up to a higher branch. Fred shrugged, and he was grinning when he turned back
around.
"Can you imagine living here?" he asked, taking the punch glass from George's hand and polishing the red, glittery liquid off. "I can't hardly. I mean. This glass alone is probably worth half of what Dad brings home every month."
"Oh, it is not," George said, somewhat annoyed at having his punch taken from him, and reached to take the glass back. "It's
probably not even real crystal."
Fred snorted, holding it out of George's reach. "What makes you think the Minister of Magic would have anything less than crystal goblets at his Christmas party?" His voice suddenly assumed a drawl, which sounded remarkably like Marcus Flint's. "Not everyone's as poor as you are, Weasley."
In the following scuffle for the glass, three things happened; 1) it was dropped. 2) Fred burst out laughing. 3) George leaned over the shattered glass and pressed his mouth against Fred's. Later, that's how Fred always remembers kissing his brother: in the reddish glow of the Minister's Christmas tree, lips still tingling with the billywig juice laced through the punch, with fairies winking and tittering in the background.
x
They fucked two years later when they were fifteen and impatient. George's mouth slipping along the tip of Fred's cock, Fred
twisting his fingers in the material of his own pajamas, and coming in a horrible, aching jolt, the kind of orgasm that it's
impossible to give yourself. That's what he thought when George wiped his mouth delicately with the back of his hand: I couldn't ever make myself come that way, so why should this curious extension of self manage it just fine?
x
So, two years between their first kiss and first fuck, and this summer is two years after that. The change isn't really noticeable this time -- not a set experience between the two of them, categorized and clear (home of Cornelius Fudge, December 23, 1990;
bedroom floor, June 15, 1992). This is more a culmination of all the little events that almost go unnoticed, losing their sting in
their peripheral, corner-of-your-mind existence. Fred is left to lie in his own bed, his own hand at his own cock, and nothing to
whisper to him except his own memories. George lies across the room and grins in the darkness, so wide that Fred can nearly see the light reflecting off of the white of his brother's teeth.
Later, Fred wouldn't even be able to say when the change started, but he always puts it down to happening when Hermione Granger comes for her annual stay at the Burrow. He knows somewhere in the back of his mind that there are likelier causes of this visible splintering between them, but it's easier to pretend that this has nothing to do with Angelina or Katie, nothing to do with the deathmoney from Harry from Cedric from Harry from the Tournament and the bitter arguments over taking handouts vs. making wise decisions.
No, in Fred's mind this space of breath before the start of seventh year is the summer of Hermione. And like that blotched, sketchy memory of his first kiss, in the long later years he remembers Hermione as how he sees her in the dawn of an early day in that visit -- he, sitting at his bedroom window, having eaten a Scintillating Stimulation pastry that was too heavy on the caffeine quantity, and she, standing in the yard, hands in the pockets of a heavy sweater and legs bare under her school skirt, calling the name of her cat. He didn't recognize her when his gaze first landed on her shape, shadowy and blue in the approaching morning, drawing one hand from her pocket to snap, as though to better get her pet's attention from across the garden. He didn't recognize her at first, but later that foreignness seemed to make sense, seemed to almost grow on him, like a song you'd hear on the wireless and dislike until you heard it a few times, and then weren't ever able to get out of your mind. Hermione.
x
He doesn't make the connection to George right away. No, that comes later, after he has had a chance to get used to the springing bustle of being back in the Burrow, after he has had a chance to reacquaint himself to all the major oddities of home life and is able to focus on the smaller, more peculiar ones, like Ginny's demurring from feeding the chickens and Percy's habitual vagueness about Penny coming by for dinner.
George has always been prone to moodiness and silence spells. Molly (Mum) used to call him her brooder, back when they were children, back before they turned into a violently, desperately happy duo of tricksters. This is why Fred doesn't notice something off at first. Doesn't pay attention to the strangeness of George's fingers nervously twisting whatever they come in contact with, twisting up Arthur's (Dad's) paperclip collection, Ginny's hair ties, Percy's misplaced quill.
Fred certainly doesn't connect it to the squirming creature at the end of the table, shifting around in her endless quest for a comfortable sitting position, leg under her, over the other, arms folded, elbow on the table, foot tapping against the leg of the table and vibrating all the dinner plates. There's no reason to draw a line between George's empty gaze and Hermione Granger, the brainy unknowable girl who likes to pick apples from the backyard trees.
No, there are several weeks when Fred doesn't imagine anything brewing in that house, and then, all of the sudden, he's not sure how he couldn't have seen it. It's a June morning; a perfectly normal morning, with the murmur of conversation all around. A clatter of breakfast dishes. The smell of grease and fresh-cut flowers. Percy grabbing Ginny's wrist with two fingers as she steals the bacon from his plate. Peripheral wonders: Dad flipping through a newspaper, Mum inspecting a stain on her apron, Hermione Granger adjusting a crucifix -- or is that a rosary? what's the difference, again? -- against her collarbones, the strains of a Ricardo Zimmerman number fading across the room from Mum's prized pink radio that no one else is allowed to touch. Fred, leaning back in his chair and shrugging off Mum's warnings that one day it will slip and he'll break his neck; Fred flipping a knut across his knuckles; Fred turning to George and finding him with his face buried against Hermione's neck. Or, no, helping her with the clasp of her necklace. Hermione tilting her head to the left to give him all the room he needs, and all that room just not being enough to stop George from brushing his cheek against the line of her throat, getting his fingers tangled up in the sunlight on the nape of her neck, sharing a blush with the Granger girl.
The pace of the morning carries on as gaily as ever. The beating of Fred's heart gives a sort of shudder of dread, and never fully recovers.
x
Hermione, Hermione, Hermione. As mysterious as she is, the greater mystery being what would drive anyone to unravel her. Five-foot-six. Impossibly uninteresting hair, impossibly pale, scrubbed face. Feathery eyebrows always twisting on her forehead, jumping in surprise and furrowing in concentration/frustration/elation, giving the appearance of two caterpillars on bleached tile, constantly wriggling to get closer to one another and never quite realizing that dream.
Fred notices, though, with a sort of sudden thud of understanding, that she's quite rich. Perhaps he never thought to pay attention before, but now there seems to be no way of avoiding noticing it -- her shoes are fine and black and polished so bright they put Molly's silverware to shame. Her clothes are always understated, but made from thick material with firm, machine-made stitches. She shies away from wearing robes, but even those that she owns are as tastefully elegant as the ones the rich Ravenclaws wear.
Well.
Rich Hermione, out of place in every way, and yet still lighting up corners around the Burrow just by sitting there, thumbing through borrowed books with fingers covered in papercuts so brutal they almost look intentional. There's nothing to this girl; she is a pile of cribbed knowledge and fancy shoelaces.
Fred can almost pretend that what he saw that morning was merely an accident of bad Weasley blushing genes and Granger harlot syndrome.
x
(Almost.)
x
Hermione likes to play these word games. Anagrams, she calls them, and it all starts because Ginny's been studying for the OWLs.
"You can't ever be too prepared," Hermione says, thumbing through the practice workbook Percy gave Ron the previous year,
which wasn't ever put to use. "I can't stress enough how important vocabulary is. You never really stop to think of how you spell incantations and magical words."
Ginny sort of smiles then, and for the rest of the summer, whenever the two of them are in the same room, they shoot words back and forth.
"Charm," Hermione says, looking up from a book.
"March," Ginny answers, moving her bishop and putting Ron into check.
"Transfiguration."
"Fountain, rigs, art. Um. Frustration, gain. Sod it, Ron, I've got you in check!"
"Very good. Aparecium."
"Puce, Maria."
Fred was annoyed by this constant exchange at first. More of Granger's pseudointellectual banalities was what first crossed his mind, but after a while the steady stream of words starts to grow on him. There's something unsettlingly comfortable about sitting in the parlor and listening to the two of them go back and forth, back and forth, like a tossed bludger. This one day, he tosses the magazine he's holding onto the coffee table and picks up one of Hermione's pencils ("So much easier to use than quills, really."), running the tip of his finger over the point of the lead. She looks at him with a sort of distasteful expression, and he asks her if she's any good at scrambling non-magical words.
"I suppose," she answers, looking as though she wants to snatch the writing instrument out of his hands. "Why do you ask, Fred?"
"Love," he says by way of answer, pressing his thumbnail into the eraser, watching her fingers slide along the sharp edges of her book.
She pauses a moment, almost as though she's puzzling over whether or not he means he's asking because of love, and then: "Vole," she replies, with a slight shrug.
“Craving.”
“Carving.”
There's a pause, and then -- "Twins."
Hermione just looks at him for a moment, those ridiculous eyebrows coming together so sharply that a dark line appears between them. Ah, caterpillars divided.
"It doesn't change," she says. "There's nothing else it becomes."
x x x
nonsequitur;
One floor above where the twins sleep, on the other side of the hallway, next door to where her parents sleep, in the room that was originally the nursery until there just wasn't any more space to graduate children to:
July 25
There are times that I like to strip my socks off and go walking through the wet dirt of the garden. Is this a bad thing to do? Ron tells me it's messy of me and stupid, because all I do is get dirty and then take up more time in the bathroom every night when he's got to piss, and thinks that girls should be able to take baths as fast as boys do. Mummy tells me to do what Ron says, but I don't think he makes a very good substitute for her advice. Sometimes I think she's spent so much time around boys, she forgets herself what ladylike conduct is. Ron is not a lady and has no idea what he's talking about.
I've stolen Hermione's dictionary. Not really stealing, it's just borrowing, but I wish she wouldn't expect me to be so fucking smart all the time. It's quite an impressive one, magical of course, not like the rest of her Muggle things, and it's even got a feature on it that will rearrange words the way she's so fond of doing. I've taken to memorizing variations on spell-words in the mornings before she can quiz me on them. Is this what being smart is?
I wish Harry would get here soon. Hermione and Ron usually keep to themselves when he is. I asked Ron when he was going to come, and he just laughed at me. I do not understand why everyone in this household treats me like that.
x x x
In the attic of the Burrow there's this piano. It's one of those player ones, the kind with scrolls of music it will play by itself, and
Arthur brought it home from a raid once, mistakenly thinking it was enchanted. After he took it apart and put it back together,
Molly refused to let it take up space in her living room -- the fact it had a tendency to play "Pomp & Circumstance" over and over again having no small part in that decision -- so the twins helped their father levitate it up the stairs to the back of the attic.
Fred put it out of his mind shortly after the above transpired, and when he wakes up that night, the hovering clock on his bedstand reading go to sleep, young man and George's bed empty, it's certainly not something that comes to mind. In fact, it's not until he's halfway to the bathroom for a glass of water that he catches the faint strains of music at all, and not until he's mostly up the stairs to the attic, following the noise that he even remembers the piano.
The door at the top of the stairs is beckoningly ajar, and Fred is gripped with a sudden sense of foreboding as he pushes it the rest of the way open. Just a nudge of fingertips sends it swinging wide enough that it almost, almost, almost hits the wall and gives him away -- he doesn't know quite what he's trying to spy upon, but some frantic urge to remain anonymous sends him slipping his hand into the exposed crack between the edge of the door and the doorway it is hinged to. His fingers are smashed, and blue for days, but the door doesn't hit the wall, and Fred has something to blame for the sudden prickling of tears in his eyes. Surely it is not because of the scene that meets his eyes when his pupils widen to iris-size and soak up all the light in the room, all the light that Hermione gives off and George repels; for there, laid back on the top of the piano, one leg in the air and hair falling down on the moving, pointless sheet music, is Miss Hermione Granger, and there, one hand on the outside of her knee and hips pressed against hers among the dust, is Mr. George H. Weasley.
There's a strange sort of moment then when Fred would almost swear that Hermione turns and looked straight at him, but when his vision stops swimming, she is turned back to George, moaning quite prettily and dropping a hand down to touch the moving keys.
Fred turns and runs back downstairs to his bedroom, only barely making sure to keep his footfalls quiet.
x
That night was a Sunday; Monday morning was the day a shopping trip in the city had been scheduled for, but when Molly drops a knock on the twins' bedroom door and then sticks her head in, telling them to get up, Fred asks if he might be excused from coming along.
"Of course, dear," she says, looking a little worried. "Are you all right?"
"Fine, Mum. Just didn't sleep well last night." George sits up in bed quite suddenly then, and Molly smiles and shuts the door.
When Fred finally crawls out of bed two hours later, he finds her in the kitchen. She's sitting at the table with a book and a glass of milk, and when he pauses in the doorway, she looks up.
"Oh," she says, with a smile. "I didn't realize anyone else stayed behind."
Fred watches her for a moment, the way a ray of sunlight is streaming in between them, lighting the dust up around her so it's
hard to see her face. He speaks while he walks, edging around the table to the icebox. "I was up late last night. I slept in."
"Yes," she answers, sipping her milk and then wiping the white off the upper lip of her smile. "I know. So did I, and I thought I
could get some reading done while everyone was in town, but. . ."
Fred leans back against the table and looks at her evenly. Hermione keeps on smiling, two dimples sandwiching the curve of lip, but she touches her hand to his knee in a way that makes his eyes widen. Four years earlier, it was George who kissed Fred, and this time Fred's not sure who exactly is to blame for the meeting of lips that follows Hermione's knuckles brushing against his cock. He'd swear it was her fault, but when conscious thought returns to him, he finds himself leaning over her in her chair.
Hermione pulls back from the kiss, though his hands are still at the nape of her neck and the curve of her hip. She looks appraisingly in those funny pale eyes that the twins have, and licks her lip, tongue catching in the dents from his teeth. "You're not George."
His hands slip on the smoothness of her dress, the smoothness of her skin. He says, "Neither are you," and she's still trying to work out what he means when he slides a finger up her thigh and into her demure blue panties.
x
Hermione smells like chalk and coconut, Fred discovers. Dust and the tropics, a conflicting set of scents that seem somehow fitting, when he thinks about it -- so terribly white, so terribly appropriate for that pale skin. There is something redeeming in that smell, something that hints she might have something interesting lingering under her rough, honed, unimpress(ed/ive) edges. There are a few blissful moments between the time he comes and slides to her side and when she sits up and slides those pale arms back into her shirtsleeves when all he can think is, still: Hermione. A spiteful current of habit runs through the experience, and tucked beneath the swimming thoughts of how strange girls are, how sweetly delicate that envelope of her charms was, there's the murderous thought that it wasn't really any better than the things he and George would do, that fucking her was completely uncalled for. For both of them. Hermione slides off of the table and bends down to straighten her socks, and Fred realizes his gaze has fallen just under the shelf that is the back of her skirt, where he can make out the edge of of her knickers still caught between the vice of her cunt, and an unfair blush starts to rise in his cheeks.
"I hate you," he says all of the sudden, sitting up and buttoning his shirt furiously. "I really do."
Hermione is silent.
x
Chalk. Coconut. Chalk. Coconut. Dust.
Dust, he realizes later. Not chalk. Dust, from that piano, from that attic, from years of Weasley soot settling. Fred stews over this for the rest of the afternoon, locked up in his room like Percy whenever deadlines loomed, and when everyone else finally returns from the shopping trip, Fred hasn't the faintest idea. George sails into their room at a quarter past five, smelling like dust and coconuts, and Fred looks over at him from the bed he's sprawled on. It's not his.
"Dinner," George says, not looking at his brother, fishing a clean shirt from his dresser and unbuttoning the one he's wearing, "is going to be on in a few."
Fred gets to his feet like a man possessed: heavy movements, dragging, nothing of his body seeming like his own, except for the wildness in his eyes. He stands at the foot of the bed for a moment, and then suddenly steps forward and takes George by the shoulders, bringing his mouth down on his brother's for the first time in 4.5 months.
x
There is a sweet moment when their mouths are connected and they are not two halves of anything, but rather two wholes that compliment each other nicely: matching prints, two frocks sewn from the same pattern, a pair, the same word written in two different hands. And then George brings his arms up to Fred's shoulder; Fred leans in, thinking it to be an embrace, and then nearly loses his balance when George shoves him backwards.
x
Fred wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stares at George for several minutes. George opts for looking at the wall. Fred listens to his heart beat, because the strength of it is something he can hear not just with his ears, but with his fingertips and feet and neck. Bum bum bum, bum bum bum. Like a waltz, almost. (Almost.)
The knowledge of his brother's actions, the humiliation of knowing he'd been lied to and avoided in favor of someone else, the sweet tang of having an indiscretion of his own, the funny sort of non-guilt of what he'd done -- they all jumble together in his veins in a sort of cocktail of recklessness, and each one of those quarter beats carries it harder and faster to his brain, to his heart, and when he speaks, it's not his own voice that he hears, but rather some unfamiliar echo of his own.
"I know what this is about. You can't hide these things from me. Christ, you never could. It's that Hermione."
George leans an elbow against the edge of his dresser, shirt half-undone in a V down to his navel. His voice is a comically bad attempt at neutrality. "What about Hermione?"
"You're fucking her. When you left today, she thought I was you. Funny, isn't it? That has a way of happening when you've got a
twin."
George doesn't move or say anything for a moment, staring blankly across the room at his bed. "Why the fuck do you care, Fred? It's none of your business what--"
"It is," Fred interrupts harshly, momentarily suspending memory of his own crimes of passion here. "It's my business because I'm your twin. Because I want you. I don't want her to fucking have you. I don't want to be shoved aside while you fuck her in this house."
"Don't you fucking get it?" George says then, turning to look straight at Fred. His voice has dropped to a cool tone, but there's a burning his eyes that's all at once desperate and vulnerable. He jabs his finger against Fred's shoulder with every word, so that later when he's standing in front of the bathroom mirror, Fred finds an ellipse of fingertip-shaped bruises along his skin. "I don't care. I don' t care what you want me to do, I don't care what you think that I owe you. It's always about you, isn't it? It's always about the things you want, the things --" he breaks off for a moment, voice going rather quiet. "You have all of these ideas, these wants, these schemes and plans and you just never once wonder about whether I'm interested in any of it."
Fred is quiet for a moment, and when he opens his mouth to reply, he finds that the power of that Indignation Cocktail has been spent, and he's left to search for words on his own. He allows himself a moment of silence, and instead he watches George's lips move as he breathes. His mouth is open, and he's sucking in air like he's just got done running in the heat. Like he's about to come. "I -- " A sort of pause. "I never. I just sort of figured that if I wanted something, you did, too. After all, we're --"
"Yes," George says, all at once sounding impatient. "I know." There's another beat, and then he brings his fist down on the wood of the dresser. "But I don't. And I didn't. Honestly -- I can't live like this anymore, Fred. This whole thing is just fucked up, and I can't stand it. I don't even know why I ever did this as long as I did. I -- do you know what I always wanted? I wanted to be a prefect, Fred. No, I'm serious, I did. I really, really did. Not like Percy or anything, but like Charlie, and like Bill."
Fred turns away a little at this, almost laughing as he looks out the bedroom window, out to the shadowy twilight-lit back yard. An odd sort of complacent hopelessness settles around him even as he opens his mouth. "I. I'm. Well, you started this." He lets the immaturity of that sink in for a moment, and then falls silent again, looking over at George.
In the half-light of their room, he can only make out the edges of his brother's profile; the messy bangs, the slope of the forehead, the nose Ginny calls aristocratic, the blur of two set lips. And just beyond it, that same profile reflected in the mirror. Two perfect outlines, matching up together. Fred can't see himself in the mirror from the angle he's at, a fact he's fleetingly grateful for.
"And I'm ending it," George says softly, fingers wrapping around the edge of his dresser, almost absently.
x
July 25 is a little more than halfway through the summer of Hermione, but afterwards, Fred wouldn't be able to remember much that happened in the early dawning days of August. A lot of sun, a lot of hours spent climbing the elm tree in the backyard and sitting up in the branches until someone came looking for him, just for the sensation of feeling missed. A lot of watching Ginny poke around in the garden and dirty her summer dresses by doing cartwheels in the fresh soil. Fred almost asks his mother if he can move out of his room with George, but instead he works out a sort of schedule where he doesn't frequent the room when George is there, and usually their time together only overlaps when they sleep.
On occasion, not even then.
x
It comes, more or less, to an end in mid-August. Fred remembers this much because this is the week Ginny is over the moon because her Egyptian waterflower plant (birthday gift from Bill, obviously) has finally gotten around to blossoming, as it had a very Egyptian tendency to only flower during the hottest parts of the year.
Mid-August, when school letters were arriving and everyone recognized Hermione's for the funny shape caused by the prefect badge. Mid-August, when ice cream turned into a creamy soup within five minutes of being taken from the icebox. Later, Fred pieces the bits of the puzzle together: for days in that week, George doesn't leave their room at night. For days, he always seems to be wandering around, making eye contact with Fred and not looking away. For days, Fred continues to redden whenever Hermione tosses her head at dinner and glances meaningfully at the spot on the table where Fred fucked her.
Disjointed bits, and later they all sort of flow.
x
There's this other word game that Hermione teaches Ginny that summer. You take one word, and then come up with others that differ from it only by one letter. Word, wood, work, ward, ford, cord. Ginny didn't really catch onto it, but over those months, he finds himself reciting strings of words like that in his head.
Fred doesn't notice anything when he first sits down to breakfast that morning. Greets everyone with a sort of tired wave, asks Ginny to pass the syrup when Hermione is closer, and then -- then looks at Hermione, and suddenly remembers that word game. She sits with her legs crossed, though one foot is being shaken, and the stiff ends of her shoelaces clack against the rest of the shoe. She cuts through her pancakes with the side of her fork, left handed, because the right hand is wrapped up with Ron's, their collective knuckles resting between their plates and Ron's cheeks aflame, though there's a sort of pride around the twist of his mouth and the corners of his eyes.
Fred thinks for a moment he can smell coconut -- or maybe that's just the waterflowers -- and his own lips curl a little as he picks up his fork. Lies, he thinks. Ties. Lips. Lids. Dies.
x
author: marvolo
pairing: fred/george, george/hermione, fred/hermione.
dedication: this is for miss catja, who has more faith in my writing ability than she really should. <3
notes: aaagh, weasleycest! hello, fandom, it's been forever. here's hoping i'm not too awfully rusty.
x
identical twins are formed when one (1) egg is released, and it is fertilized by one (1) sperm. At some point after fertilization, the egg splits in two genetically identical halves. Identical twins are always of the same sex. They share all genes. also see: conjoined twins; fraternal twins; multiple births -- Professor Zigfield's Encyclopedia of Medical Wonders, found in the study of Arthur Weasley
x
Identical is a relative word. When Fred hears it, he imagines parallel lines, two evenly measured angles. Two perfect outlines that fit up just right with nothing to spare. One of his mother's cookie cutters, punching out gingerbread men, all exactly the same, down to the dips in their frosted smiles.
To Fred, identical is not the word that describes being a twin.
He looks at George and he knows that they are not the same, through and through. Their blood might be the same, it might have the same complexities that only a mediwizard would be able to understand, but their bones are not the same. Two different hearts, beating at different times, made for such different things that they'd never line up together.
One afternoon, Fred catalogues the little differences he's noticed, while idly scribbling pictures of arrows on the back of one of Ginny's school notebooks. They're all fairly obvious, but they're the sort of thing no one would notice unless they were looking for the differences. Which no one ever did.
George has a wider smile, and a lower voice, and hands a quarter of an inch longer. He can wear the color yellow, roll his tongue, and bend his left thumb backwards. When George picks up a magazine, he reads it back to front; when standing very long, he folds his arms.
Fred mimics these mannerisms at times, when the two of them are playing some prank and pretending to be each other. Sometimes even when they aren't, just so he can try and smudge out the fact that there really are differences. He wonders when he does this: what would happen if I just stopped trying to draw the gaps closed? what would happen if I stopped taking up the slack?
He knows, though, that this won't happen. That's why they're twins in the first place, you see. George is the boy who always pulls away, and Fred comes tumbling after.
x
Fred was thirteen when he and George first kissed; it was the first Ministry event either of them had attended. Arthur (Dad) had recently received an unexpected promotion, and thus was in very good humor when the invitations to the Minister's Christmas ball were handed out. In such good humor, as it seemed, that he decided to bring all available children over the age of eleven (the twins; Percy) to the event, and Molly (Mum) bought them each a set of nice robes to wear.
That's what they're wearing when they looked at the Christmas tree in the Fudges' ballroom antechamber. It's about as tall as three men standing on each other's shoulders, and covered in popcorn strings and bored-looking fairies sitting here and there, patting their hair and glowing among the needles.
Fred had walked into the room first, and when George trailed in, Fred was prodding at one of the fairies with the tip of his finger.
"Don't," George protested. "You'll hurt her."
The fairy slapped at Fred's fingertip and huffed up to a higher branch. Fred shrugged, and he was grinning when he turned back
around.
"Can you imagine living here?" he asked, taking the punch glass from George's hand and polishing the red, glittery liquid off. "I can't hardly. I mean. This glass alone is probably worth half of what Dad brings home every month."
"Oh, it is not," George said, somewhat annoyed at having his punch taken from him, and reached to take the glass back. "It's
probably not even real crystal."
Fred snorted, holding it out of George's reach. "What makes you think the Minister of Magic would have anything less than crystal goblets at his Christmas party?" His voice suddenly assumed a drawl, which sounded remarkably like Marcus Flint's. "Not everyone's as poor as you are, Weasley."
In the following scuffle for the glass, three things happened; 1) it was dropped. 2) Fred burst out laughing. 3) George leaned over the shattered glass and pressed his mouth against Fred's. Later, that's how Fred always remembers kissing his brother: in the reddish glow of the Minister's Christmas tree, lips still tingling with the billywig juice laced through the punch, with fairies winking and tittering in the background.
x
They fucked two years later when they were fifteen and impatient. George's mouth slipping along the tip of Fred's cock, Fred
twisting his fingers in the material of his own pajamas, and coming in a horrible, aching jolt, the kind of orgasm that it's
impossible to give yourself. That's what he thought when George wiped his mouth delicately with the back of his hand: I couldn't ever make myself come that way, so why should this curious extension of self manage it just fine?
x
So, two years between their first kiss and first fuck, and this summer is two years after that. The change isn't really noticeable this time -- not a set experience between the two of them, categorized and clear (home of Cornelius Fudge, December 23, 1990;
bedroom floor, June 15, 1992). This is more a culmination of all the little events that almost go unnoticed, losing their sting in
their peripheral, corner-of-your-mind existence. Fred is left to lie in his own bed, his own hand at his own cock, and nothing to
whisper to him except his own memories. George lies across the room and grins in the darkness, so wide that Fred can nearly see the light reflecting off of the white of his brother's teeth.
Later, Fred wouldn't even be able to say when the change started, but he always puts it down to happening when Hermione Granger comes for her annual stay at the Burrow. He knows somewhere in the back of his mind that there are likelier causes of this visible splintering between them, but it's easier to pretend that this has nothing to do with Angelina or Katie, nothing to do with the deathmoney from Harry from Cedric from Harry from the Tournament and the bitter arguments over taking handouts vs. making wise decisions.
No, in Fred's mind this space of breath before the start of seventh year is the summer of Hermione. And like that blotched, sketchy memory of his first kiss, in the long later years he remembers Hermione as how he sees her in the dawn of an early day in that visit -- he, sitting at his bedroom window, having eaten a Scintillating Stimulation pastry that was too heavy on the caffeine quantity, and she, standing in the yard, hands in the pockets of a heavy sweater and legs bare under her school skirt, calling the name of her cat. He didn't recognize her when his gaze first landed on her shape, shadowy and blue in the approaching morning, drawing one hand from her pocket to snap, as though to better get her pet's attention from across the garden. He didn't recognize her at first, but later that foreignness seemed to make sense, seemed to almost grow on him, like a song you'd hear on the wireless and dislike until you heard it a few times, and then weren't ever able to get out of your mind. Hermione.
x
He doesn't make the connection to George right away. No, that comes later, after he has had a chance to get used to the springing bustle of being back in the Burrow, after he has had a chance to reacquaint himself to all the major oddities of home life and is able to focus on the smaller, more peculiar ones, like Ginny's demurring from feeding the chickens and Percy's habitual vagueness about Penny coming by for dinner.
George has always been prone to moodiness and silence spells. Molly (Mum) used to call him her brooder, back when they were children, back before they turned into a violently, desperately happy duo of tricksters. This is why Fred doesn't notice something off at first. Doesn't pay attention to the strangeness of George's fingers nervously twisting whatever they come in contact with, twisting up Arthur's (Dad's) paperclip collection, Ginny's hair ties, Percy's misplaced quill.
Fred certainly doesn't connect it to the squirming creature at the end of the table, shifting around in her endless quest for a comfortable sitting position, leg under her, over the other, arms folded, elbow on the table, foot tapping against the leg of the table and vibrating all the dinner plates. There's no reason to draw a line between George's empty gaze and Hermione Granger, the brainy unknowable girl who likes to pick apples from the backyard trees.
No, there are several weeks when Fred doesn't imagine anything brewing in that house, and then, all of the sudden, he's not sure how he couldn't have seen it. It's a June morning; a perfectly normal morning, with the murmur of conversation all around. A clatter of breakfast dishes. The smell of grease and fresh-cut flowers. Percy grabbing Ginny's wrist with two fingers as she steals the bacon from his plate. Peripheral wonders: Dad flipping through a newspaper, Mum inspecting a stain on her apron, Hermione Granger adjusting a crucifix -- or is that a rosary? what's the difference, again? -- against her collarbones, the strains of a Ricardo Zimmerman number fading across the room from Mum's prized pink radio that no one else is allowed to touch. Fred, leaning back in his chair and shrugging off Mum's warnings that one day it will slip and he'll break his neck; Fred flipping a knut across his knuckles; Fred turning to George and finding him with his face buried against Hermione's neck. Or, no, helping her with the clasp of her necklace. Hermione tilting her head to the left to give him all the room he needs, and all that room just not being enough to stop George from brushing his cheek against the line of her throat, getting his fingers tangled up in the sunlight on the nape of her neck, sharing a blush with the Granger girl.
The pace of the morning carries on as gaily as ever. The beating of Fred's heart gives a sort of shudder of dread, and never fully recovers.
x
Hermione, Hermione, Hermione. As mysterious as she is, the greater mystery being what would drive anyone to unravel her. Five-foot-six. Impossibly uninteresting hair, impossibly pale, scrubbed face. Feathery eyebrows always twisting on her forehead, jumping in surprise and furrowing in concentration/frustration/elation, giving the appearance of two caterpillars on bleached tile, constantly wriggling to get closer to one another and never quite realizing that dream.
Fred notices, though, with a sort of sudden thud of understanding, that she's quite rich. Perhaps he never thought to pay attention before, but now there seems to be no way of avoiding noticing it -- her shoes are fine and black and polished so bright they put Molly's silverware to shame. Her clothes are always understated, but made from thick material with firm, machine-made stitches. She shies away from wearing robes, but even those that she owns are as tastefully elegant as the ones the rich Ravenclaws wear.
Well.
Rich Hermione, out of place in every way, and yet still lighting up corners around the Burrow just by sitting there, thumbing through borrowed books with fingers covered in papercuts so brutal they almost look intentional. There's nothing to this girl; she is a pile of cribbed knowledge and fancy shoelaces.
Fred can almost pretend that what he saw that morning was merely an accident of bad Weasley blushing genes and Granger harlot syndrome.
x
(Almost.)
x
Hermione likes to play these word games. Anagrams, she calls them, and it all starts because Ginny's been studying for the OWLs.
"You can't ever be too prepared," Hermione says, thumbing through the practice workbook Percy gave Ron the previous year,
which wasn't ever put to use. "I can't stress enough how important vocabulary is. You never really stop to think of how you spell incantations and magical words."
Ginny sort of smiles then, and for the rest of the summer, whenever the two of them are in the same room, they shoot words back and forth.
"Charm," Hermione says, looking up from a book.
"March," Ginny answers, moving her bishop and putting Ron into check.
"Transfiguration."
"Fountain, rigs, art. Um. Frustration, gain. Sod it, Ron, I've got you in check!"
"Very good. Aparecium."
"Puce, Maria."
Fred was annoyed by this constant exchange at first. More of Granger's pseudointellectual banalities was what first crossed his mind, but after a while the steady stream of words starts to grow on him. There's something unsettlingly comfortable about sitting in the parlor and listening to the two of them go back and forth, back and forth, like a tossed bludger. This one day, he tosses the magazine he's holding onto the coffee table and picks up one of Hermione's pencils ("So much easier to use than quills, really."), running the tip of his finger over the point of the lead. She looks at him with a sort of distasteful expression, and he asks her if she's any good at scrambling non-magical words.
"I suppose," she answers, looking as though she wants to snatch the writing instrument out of his hands. "Why do you ask, Fred?"
"Love," he says by way of answer, pressing his thumbnail into the eraser, watching her fingers slide along the sharp edges of her book.
She pauses a moment, almost as though she's puzzling over whether or not he means he's asking because of love, and then: "Vole," she replies, with a slight shrug.
“Craving.”
“Carving.”
There's a pause, and then -- "Twins."
Hermione just looks at him for a moment, those ridiculous eyebrows coming together so sharply that a dark line appears between them. Ah, caterpillars divided.
"It doesn't change," she says. "There's nothing else it becomes."
x x x
nonsequitur;
One floor above where the twins sleep, on the other side of the hallway, next door to where her parents sleep, in the room that was originally the nursery until there just wasn't any more space to graduate children to:
July 25
There are times that I like to strip my socks off and go walking through the wet dirt of the garden. Is this a bad thing to do? Ron tells me it's messy of me and stupid, because all I do is get dirty and then take up more time in the bathroom every night when he's got to piss, and thinks that girls should be able to take baths as fast as boys do. Mummy tells me to do what Ron says, but I don't think he makes a very good substitute for her advice. Sometimes I think she's spent so much time around boys, she forgets herself what ladylike conduct is. Ron is not a lady and has no idea what he's talking about.
I've stolen Hermione's dictionary. Not really stealing, it's just borrowing, but I wish she wouldn't expect me to be so fucking smart all the time. It's quite an impressive one, magical of course, not like the rest of her Muggle things, and it's even got a feature on it that will rearrange words the way she's so fond of doing. I've taken to memorizing variations on spell-words in the mornings before she can quiz me on them. Is this what being smart is?
I wish Harry would get here soon. Hermione and Ron usually keep to themselves when he is. I asked Ron when he was going to come, and he just laughed at me. I do not understand why everyone in this household treats me like that.
x x x
In the attic of the Burrow there's this piano. It's one of those player ones, the kind with scrolls of music it will play by itself, and
Arthur brought it home from a raid once, mistakenly thinking it was enchanted. After he took it apart and put it back together,
Molly refused to let it take up space in her living room -- the fact it had a tendency to play "Pomp & Circumstance" over and over again having no small part in that decision -- so the twins helped their father levitate it up the stairs to the back of the attic.
Fred put it out of his mind shortly after the above transpired, and when he wakes up that night, the hovering clock on his bedstand reading go to sleep, young man and George's bed empty, it's certainly not something that comes to mind. In fact, it's not until he's halfway to the bathroom for a glass of water that he catches the faint strains of music at all, and not until he's mostly up the stairs to the attic, following the noise that he even remembers the piano.
The door at the top of the stairs is beckoningly ajar, and Fred is gripped with a sudden sense of foreboding as he pushes it the rest of the way open. Just a nudge of fingertips sends it swinging wide enough that it almost, almost, almost hits the wall and gives him away -- he doesn't know quite what he's trying to spy upon, but some frantic urge to remain anonymous sends him slipping his hand into the exposed crack between the edge of the door and the doorway it is hinged to. His fingers are smashed, and blue for days, but the door doesn't hit the wall, and Fred has something to blame for the sudden prickling of tears in his eyes. Surely it is not because of the scene that meets his eyes when his pupils widen to iris-size and soak up all the light in the room, all the light that Hermione gives off and George repels; for there, laid back on the top of the piano, one leg in the air and hair falling down on the moving, pointless sheet music, is Miss Hermione Granger, and there, one hand on the outside of her knee and hips pressed against hers among the dust, is Mr. George H. Weasley.
There's a strange sort of moment then when Fred would almost swear that Hermione turns and looked straight at him, but when his vision stops swimming, she is turned back to George, moaning quite prettily and dropping a hand down to touch the moving keys.
Fred turns and runs back downstairs to his bedroom, only barely making sure to keep his footfalls quiet.
x
That night was a Sunday; Monday morning was the day a shopping trip in the city had been scheduled for, but when Molly drops a knock on the twins' bedroom door and then sticks her head in, telling them to get up, Fred asks if he might be excused from coming along.
"Of course, dear," she says, looking a little worried. "Are you all right?"
"Fine, Mum. Just didn't sleep well last night." George sits up in bed quite suddenly then, and Molly smiles and shuts the door.
When Fred finally crawls out of bed two hours later, he finds her in the kitchen. She's sitting at the table with a book and a glass of milk, and when he pauses in the doorway, she looks up.
"Oh," she says, with a smile. "I didn't realize anyone else stayed behind."
Fred watches her for a moment, the way a ray of sunlight is streaming in between them, lighting the dust up around her so it's
hard to see her face. He speaks while he walks, edging around the table to the icebox. "I was up late last night. I slept in."
"Yes," she answers, sipping her milk and then wiping the white off the upper lip of her smile. "I know. So did I, and I thought I
could get some reading done while everyone was in town, but. . ."
Fred leans back against the table and looks at her evenly. Hermione keeps on smiling, two dimples sandwiching the curve of lip, but she touches her hand to his knee in a way that makes his eyes widen. Four years earlier, it was George who kissed Fred, and this time Fred's not sure who exactly is to blame for the meeting of lips that follows Hermione's knuckles brushing against his cock. He'd swear it was her fault, but when conscious thought returns to him, he finds himself leaning over her in her chair.
Hermione pulls back from the kiss, though his hands are still at the nape of her neck and the curve of her hip. She looks appraisingly in those funny pale eyes that the twins have, and licks her lip, tongue catching in the dents from his teeth. "You're not George."
His hands slip on the smoothness of her dress, the smoothness of her skin. He says, "Neither are you," and she's still trying to work out what he means when he slides a finger up her thigh and into her demure blue panties.
x
Hermione smells like chalk and coconut, Fred discovers. Dust and the tropics, a conflicting set of scents that seem somehow fitting, when he thinks about it -- so terribly white, so terribly appropriate for that pale skin. There is something redeeming in that smell, something that hints she might have something interesting lingering under her rough, honed, unimpress(ed/ive) edges. There are a few blissful moments between the time he comes and slides to her side and when she sits up and slides those pale arms back into her shirtsleeves when all he can think is, still: Hermione. A spiteful current of habit runs through the experience, and tucked beneath the swimming thoughts of how strange girls are, how sweetly delicate that envelope of her charms was, there's the murderous thought that it wasn't really any better than the things he and George would do, that fucking her was completely uncalled for. For both of them. Hermione slides off of the table and bends down to straighten her socks, and Fred realizes his gaze has fallen just under the shelf that is the back of her skirt, where he can make out the edge of of her knickers still caught between the vice of her cunt, and an unfair blush starts to rise in his cheeks.
"I hate you," he says all of the sudden, sitting up and buttoning his shirt furiously. "I really do."
Hermione is silent.
x
Chalk. Coconut. Chalk. Coconut. Dust.
Dust, he realizes later. Not chalk. Dust, from that piano, from that attic, from years of Weasley soot settling. Fred stews over this for the rest of the afternoon, locked up in his room like Percy whenever deadlines loomed, and when everyone else finally returns from the shopping trip, Fred hasn't the faintest idea. George sails into their room at a quarter past five, smelling like dust and coconuts, and Fred looks over at him from the bed he's sprawled on. It's not his.
"Dinner," George says, not looking at his brother, fishing a clean shirt from his dresser and unbuttoning the one he's wearing, "is going to be on in a few."
Fred gets to his feet like a man possessed: heavy movements, dragging, nothing of his body seeming like his own, except for the wildness in his eyes. He stands at the foot of the bed for a moment, and then suddenly steps forward and takes George by the shoulders, bringing his mouth down on his brother's for the first time in 4.5 months.
x
There is a sweet moment when their mouths are connected and they are not two halves of anything, but rather two wholes that compliment each other nicely: matching prints, two frocks sewn from the same pattern, a pair, the same word written in two different hands. And then George brings his arms up to Fred's shoulder; Fred leans in, thinking it to be an embrace, and then nearly loses his balance when George shoves him backwards.
x
Fred wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stares at George for several minutes. George opts for looking at the wall. Fred listens to his heart beat, because the strength of it is something he can hear not just with his ears, but with his fingertips and feet and neck. Bum bum bum, bum bum bum. Like a waltz, almost. (Almost.)
The knowledge of his brother's actions, the humiliation of knowing he'd been lied to and avoided in favor of someone else, the sweet tang of having an indiscretion of his own, the funny sort of non-guilt of what he'd done -- they all jumble together in his veins in a sort of cocktail of recklessness, and each one of those quarter beats carries it harder and faster to his brain, to his heart, and when he speaks, it's not his own voice that he hears, but rather some unfamiliar echo of his own.
"I know what this is about. You can't hide these things from me. Christ, you never could. It's that Hermione."
George leans an elbow against the edge of his dresser, shirt half-undone in a V down to his navel. His voice is a comically bad attempt at neutrality. "What about Hermione?"
"You're fucking her. When you left today, she thought I was you. Funny, isn't it? That has a way of happening when you've got a
twin."
George doesn't move or say anything for a moment, staring blankly across the room at his bed. "Why the fuck do you care, Fred? It's none of your business what--"
"It is," Fred interrupts harshly, momentarily suspending memory of his own crimes of passion here. "It's my business because I'm your twin. Because I want you. I don't want her to fucking have you. I don't want to be shoved aside while you fuck her in this house."
"Don't you fucking get it?" George says then, turning to look straight at Fred. His voice has dropped to a cool tone, but there's a burning his eyes that's all at once desperate and vulnerable. He jabs his finger against Fred's shoulder with every word, so that later when he's standing in front of the bathroom mirror, Fred finds an ellipse of fingertip-shaped bruises along his skin. "I don't care. I don' t care what you want me to do, I don't care what you think that I owe you. It's always about you, isn't it? It's always about the things you want, the things --" he breaks off for a moment, voice going rather quiet. "You have all of these ideas, these wants, these schemes and plans and you just never once wonder about whether I'm interested in any of it."
Fred is quiet for a moment, and when he opens his mouth to reply, he finds that the power of that Indignation Cocktail has been spent, and he's left to search for words on his own. He allows himself a moment of silence, and instead he watches George's lips move as he breathes. His mouth is open, and he's sucking in air like he's just got done running in the heat. Like he's about to come. "I -- " A sort of pause. "I never. I just sort of figured that if I wanted something, you did, too. After all, we're --"
"Yes," George says, all at once sounding impatient. "I know." There's another beat, and then he brings his fist down on the wood of the dresser. "But I don't. And I didn't. Honestly -- I can't live like this anymore, Fred. This whole thing is just fucked up, and I can't stand it. I don't even know why I ever did this as long as I did. I -- do you know what I always wanted? I wanted to be a prefect, Fred. No, I'm serious, I did. I really, really did. Not like Percy or anything, but like Charlie, and like Bill."
Fred turns away a little at this, almost laughing as he looks out the bedroom window, out to the shadowy twilight-lit back yard. An odd sort of complacent hopelessness settles around him even as he opens his mouth. "I. I'm. Well, you started this." He lets the immaturity of that sink in for a moment, and then falls silent again, looking over at George.
In the half-light of their room, he can only make out the edges of his brother's profile; the messy bangs, the slope of the forehead, the nose Ginny calls aristocratic, the blur of two set lips. And just beyond it, that same profile reflected in the mirror. Two perfect outlines, matching up together. Fred can't see himself in the mirror from the angle he's at, a fact he's fleetingly grateful for.
"And I'm ending it," George says softly, fingers wrapping around the edge of his dresser, almost absently.
x
July 25 is a little more than halfway through the summer of Hermione, but afterwards, Fred wouldn't be able to remember much that happened in the early dawning days of August. A lot of sun, a lot of hours spent climbing the elm tree in the backyard and sitting up in the branches until someone came looking for him, just for the sensation of feeling missed. A lot of watching Ginny poke around in the garden and dirty her summer dresses by doing cartwheels in the fresh soil. Fred almost asks his mother if he can move out of his room with George, but instead he works out a sort of schedule where he doesn't frequent the room when George is there, and usually their time together only overlaps when they sleep.
On occasion, not even then.
x
It comes, more or less, to an end in mid-August. Fred remembers this much because this is the week Ginny is over the moon because her Egyptian waterflower plant (birthday gift from Bill, obviously) has finally gotten around to blossoming, as it had a very Egyptian tendency to only flower during the hottest parts of the year.
Mid-August, when school letters were arriving and everyone recognized Hermione's for the funny shape caused by the prefect badge. Mid-August, when ice cream turned into a creamy soup within five minutes of being taken from the icebox. Later, Fred pieces the bits of the puzzle together: for days in that week, George doesn't leave their room at night. For days, he always seems to be wandering around, making eye contact with Fred and not looking away. For days, Fred continues to redden whenever Hermione tosses her head at dinner and glances meaningfully at the spot on the table where Fred fucked her.
Disjointed bits, and later they all sort of flow.
x
There's this other word game that Hermione teaches Ginny that summer. You take one word, and then come up with others that differ from it only by one letter. Word, wood, work, ward, ford, cord. Ginny didn't really catch onto it, but over those months, he finds himself reciting strings of words like that in his head.
Fred doesn't notice anything when he first sits down to breakfast that morning. Greets everyone with a sort of tired wave, asks Ginny to pass the syrup when Hermione is closer, and then -- then looks at Hermione, and suddenly remembers that word game. She sits with her legs crossed, though one foot is being shaken, and the stiff ends of her shoelaces clack against the rest of the shoe. She cuts through her pancakes with the side of her fork, left handed, because the right hand is wrapped up with Ron's, their collective knuckles resting between their plates and Ron's cheeks aflame, though there's a sort of pride around the twist of his mouth and the corners of his eyes.
Fred thinks for a moment he can smell coconut -- or maybe that's just the waterflowers -- and his own lips curl a little as he picks up his fork. Lies, he thinks. Ties. Lips. Lids. Dies.
x