The Chasm

Luna’s face cracked into a smile that made her look suddenly childlike with happiness. “Yes,” she breathed. “We do. I found them.”

Percy felt his chest constrict a bit. “They were lucky it was you,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose. Though I don’t really understand all the fuss,” Luna said serenely. “There are lots of good reasons to touch, aren’t there? And theirs was the best.”

Percy shook his head in disbelief. “You don’t find it at all odd that… that… they’re brothers? Blood relations?”

“It’s a little odd.” Luna shrugged. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a little odd. I’m a little odd. So are you.” She paused briefly, staring intently into Percy’s face, which was still numb-looking and overly pale. “Everything was getting so dark. It was getting terribly hard to find love anywhere, wasn’t it?”

The lump in Percy’s throat was growing. He could do nothing but jerk his chin in some approximation of a nod. Everything had been dark. Everything had been dangerous and threatening, and he hadn’t acknowledged it, hadn’t protected anyone who mattered. He could have lost any of them at any moment, any moment at all. He’d almost lost his father. He had lost his brother. Most of his waking moments these days were spent avoiding cataloguing the thousands of different ways in which he could have lost all of them.

Luna continued to stare as Percy averted his gaze, trying to reign in the prickling sensation behind his eyes. “I think you should take love where you find it. There are so many things in this world, Weatherby, that are worse than being in love with your brother.”

Percy coughed wetly and tried to swallow around his grief. She was so straightforward, so ridiculously blunt, so… uncompromising, but in this soft sort of way that made her impossible to argue with. He couldn’t make his voice work, not even to protest when she slid the Ogling Ocs back onto his nose.

“There’s more.”

Percy’s body was stiff from working in Luna’s garden all day and from holding the same rigid position on the roof, but he soon forgot the discomfort in his limbs and back as George’s next memory came wavering into focus, and it immediately shifted to his stomach.

Fred and George are flying through the air. A manacle of sorts dangles uselessly from Fred’s broom, swinging wildly as they go. Around them, fireworks are cracking and popping and shooting off in a blaze of color, and they are weaving in and out of them, deftly ducking and swerving and tossing more over their shoulders.

Watching this scene made Percy feel as though he were the one on the broom, so quickly was it flashing and swooping and diving in front of his eyes. He had to shut them so as not to grow too dizzy.

It must have showed on his face, as he heard Luna giggle and lifted the spectacles slightly to see her grinning at him. The work of trying not to cry was replaced with the work of trying not to retch, and Luna smiled. “I’ll tell you when it’s over. Do you know what they’re doing?”

Percy nodded. He did. Though he hadn’t been there to witness it, his brothers’ defiance of Headmistress Umbridge had quickly become the stuff of legend, and news of it had even managed to reach him at the Ministry. Of course, he had been less than pleased at the time (and had only resisted firing off an angry owl to them because he was afraid of what they might send him in return), but now, witnessing it (even with the brevity with which he could stomach), it seemed to him a spectacularly Gryffindor act. They had, quite literally, let off a bit of light into the darkness, and when Percy deigned to glance back, he saw the crowd of students (and professors!, he noted, with a bit of shock) below them in peals of applause and laughter, and he tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have hope spark back up and catch brilliantly aflame in the midst of it all.

That was Fred: a sparkling dragon, fierce and bright and streaking off in prankish pursuit of all that was repressive and vicious and wrong. And that was George: his counterpart; the second magical heartstring; the crazy, frantic rhythm that drove him forward, even when he must have been afraid.

When Luna whispered, her voice full of mirth, “You can look again,” Percy opened his eyes and watched his twin brothers skid to a landing in a field somewhere Percy didn’t recognize, side-by-side, and tumble together in the grass. Their arms flew around each other, and they rolled, one on top of the other, their hands gripping each other’s cheeks and hair, their lips coming together, then parting in manic laughter, then coming together again, over and over and over, as behind them, the sun sank and the clouds shimmered and the world grew dark.

Mercifully, the scene faded to black just as they began clawing at each other’s clothes, and Percy was quite able to imagine – though he chose not to – exactly what came next. Something inside of him stirred, quite accidentally, and he recalled with surprising clarity the way Luna’s body had opened for him, so similarly, across the grass only a few hours ago.

Beside him, Luna was laughing quietly, her hands clamped over her mouth to muffle the sound, but with much abandon nonetheless. “Oh, I’m so sorry you missed that,” she gasped, squeezing Percy’s thigh and snorting. “It was wonderful!” Glancing at him slyly, she added, “I bet you wouldn’t have thought it was so wonderful, though, would you, Bat-Nose?”

“No, I suspect not at the time,” Percy admitted, and his eyes clouded over. He was beginning to suspect that there may have been a lot of wonderful things that he had failed to recognize over the years.

Luna caught his expression, though, and tweaked his nose, startling him. “Then I’m glad you weren’t there. I’m glad you waited.”

As though he’d done it on purpose. In spite of everything, the corners of Percy’s mouth twitched up into a shadow of a smile. He supposed that, in Luna’s concept of the world, he had done it on purpose, whether he knew it or not.

Luna’s giggles subsided, and she gestured back at the window. “This is the last one,” she whispered. “Pay attention.” Once again, she twined her fingers through Percy’s, and she leaned against him, her head – hair askew and frizzy from the heat – propped against his narrow shoulder as though it were the most comfortable spot on earth.

They both adjusted their glasses.

Fred and George are climbing a steep, dark staircase. Behind them, several trunks and boxes and shabby-looking pieces of furniture are levitating in a sloppy line-up. Percy recognizes the battered, too-tall table, and he realizes now that it had once occupied a corner of their father’s garage.

As they reach the door (marked with a large, tarnished number ninety-three, identical to the one outside), Fred begins fumbling with a set of keys, jabbing each one in turn at a rusty-looking lock. His hands are quick and clumsy with excitement, and he can’t make the proper connection. George says something and elbows Fred gently in the ribs, snatching the ring from between his brother’s long fingers. Deftly, he pulls out the proper key and slides it into the lock. The door stutters roughly open, and they both step through the threshold.

The flat is small, but decently-lit. They wander through it, hand-in-hand, entering every room (there are only four: a bedroom, a bathroom, a combined kitchen/dining room, and a tiny sitting room) and stopping to stare around in satisfied awe. Every so often, one says something to the other, and their hands squeeze like the beat of a heart between them.

The furniture begins arranging itself, and items fly from their boxes and take their places on shelves, in cupboards, in drawers. Percy can’t help but be impressed by the crispness of this particular bit of magic.

As the sofa slides into place, George gives Fred a rather dirty-looking wink (Percy grimaces) and before it has even stopped moving, they crash onto it together, without regard for the still-open front door, and become a tangled heap of bright red hair and long, graceful limbs.

The scene fades into nothingness as they begin kissing in earnest, lips catching between teeth and two pairs of identical eyes gazing into one another with contentment so deep and peaceful that it is almost unnerving every time they come apart.

Luna leaned over and carefully removed the Ogling Ocs before another image started to take the last one’s place. She removed her own, as well, and stowed them both back in her satchel.

For several moments, they sat, side-by-side, heads cocked, gazing at one another in silence. Luna was looking at Percy as though she was waiting for him to shout “Aha!” and come out with some brilliant revelation, and Percy was looking at her as though he were trying very hard not to disappoint.

“Is that… was that everything?” he finally asked her, searching her face for a clue as to her intentions.

Tapping her fingertips across Percy’s knuckles, she replied, quite simply, “Yes.”

Percy’s eyebrows knitted together in a sort of concentrated confusion, and his mouth opened. Before he could inquire further, however, Luna brought his hands to her lips, sucked one finger firmly into her mouth, and they Disapparated.


___________________________



They reappeared quite solidly on Luna’s bright patchwork quilt, bouncing comically off the springs with the force of their landing. Luna giggled and locked her arms around Percy’s shoulders, bringing both of their bodies flat across the bed.

“There!” she said breathlessly, rolling over and pinning Percy to her mattress. “I was hoping that would work!” Her grin was, somehow, both goofy and vaguely saucy, and the effect was disarming. Percy had fully intended to return to his own flat this evening, as he had to return to his office the next day, but he found himself suddenly quite unable to lend his voice to this.

Luna sprawled her body fully against his so that her mouth was against Percy’s cheek. He lay there, a little flustered but not entirely unhappy, still half-pondering what they had seen and wondering, still, what Luna’s intentions for all of this had been.

She seemed to read his mind. “Do you get it?” she asked, her breath warm against Percy’s skin.

Percy was silent, trying to piece things together. “Well. What you showed me… they all seemed to be… significant. Important moments, yes? Being born, getting their wands, their first er… kiss, and such.” His cheeks colored up a bit, and he tried not to replay the various intimate firsts he had witnessed through his head.

Luna’s smile broadened. “Right!” she breathed, sounding excited. “Right! You’re very perceptive.” She pressed her lips against Percy’s cheek several times in rapid succession, and Percy lost count at six, when his own face broke into a smile.

Luna kissed it wider and wider, and soon, her smiling mouth had found its way to his, and though he still felt nagged by what she was not yet explaining, he let her tongue part the seam of his lips and tasted her breath, heavy with tea and nighttime and stars, and that’s how they stayed for the better part of an hour, fully dressed and close, their kiss patient and wise and warm.

Finally, Luna rolled herself off of Percy and came to rest at his side, staring at the ceiling of her bedroom, which, Percy noticed now for the first time, was painted to resemble a storm sky, thick with thunderheads and strange, misplaced-looking rays of light spearing through them. “So do you understand now? What you have to do?”

“No,” Percy said, quietly and truthfully. He had come to accept that her logic was not always crystal-clear and easy to follow and had decided it best to just admit up-front when he was lost.

Luna sat up and crossed her legs. She tugged at Percy’s hand until he pulled himself upright facing her. Her voice became low and edged in reverence. “You saw everything. You saw all of the big things. Being born, and getting their first wands, and getting their first kiss. You saw their first day of school, and you saw the first time they had sex. You saw them leave school. You saw their first time in their flat. All of George’s stuff. All of Fred’s stuff.”

Percy looked at Luna searchingly. “Yes,” he said slowly, tilting his head again, trying to get that angle where everything would suddenly become clear.

“Except you didn’t see all of Fred’s stuff.”

“No…?”

“No. They did everything together. All of that stuff. All of the important things; the things you remember. The things that make up a life.” Her face was growing misty. It seemed to blur around the edges. “George was there for all of Fred’s stuff. Fred’s life was George’s life. Their whole lives, two of them living one. Right?”

Percy paused and thought for a moment. He was beginning to catch on. “Right,” he said slowly. “It seems that way. It always seemed that way to the rest of us, too, I suppose. Always Fred and George, never really Fred or George on their own. Though we didn’t…” he trailed off.

“Didn’t know they were lovers,” Luna finished for him. The words sounded stark, but they were the truth, and Percy nodded.

“No, we didn’t know that.” He was still having difficulty wrapping his mind around it, though it was certainly obvious now.

“But they didn’t finish properly,” Luna continued, reaching out her hands and cupping Percy’s bony knees, one in each. “It didn’t go the way it was supposed to go. He wasn’t there.”

Percy shook his head. “No, he wasn’t,” he whispered.

“But you were. George wasn’t, but you were. And George was there for everything else. George knew everything there was to know about Fred. He knew how he was born, and he knew how his magic worked, and he knew how his body worked, and he knew how his mind worked. He knew all that stuff. But he doesn’t know how he died.”

“He knows…” Percy started, but Luna put a finger to his lips, cutting him off.

“Not the way that you know. Not the way that he knows everything else. He doesn’t know it in his bones. He doesn’t know it in his spirit.” She tried to catch Percy’s eyes, but they were cast down at his lap, stubborn and still.

“That’s why he’s lost,” she continued, her voice almost a whisper now. “He’s halfway through the veil, looking for Fred. Trying to know the end. But he’s not going to find him that way. He’s just going to disappear.”

Percy had gone very still. He knew where this was going, and he felt like there was ice forming in his chest. Her words froze him almost solid. Carefully, he unfolded his legs and pressed his feet into the floor. It seemed to take an unnecessarily large amount of time before he felt anything steady beneath them.

“You have to go and get him, Weatherby,” she said, her voice sounding brave, recognizing the storm that was brewing. “He has to know. You have to be like your Mum. You have to sit him in your lap…” her voice trailed off. “No, you don’t have to do that. But you have to sit him down. And you have to tell him the story, the way your Mum did.”

With every word, Percy’s body temperature seemed to drop a degree. Her voice was sounding very far away. He had dedicated almost the entirety of the past three months to forgetting that story, to pushing it from his mind, to digging a neat little grave for it in his heart and burying it deeper than Fred’s body could ever go, beneath layers of guilt and shame and regret and rage and terror and a screaming, ripping, tearing despair that would certainly swallow him whole if he unearthed it. There was no way that he was going to look his baby brother in the eye and recount something that George should never, ever, ever have to know. He was not going to invite his own ghosts into George’s home. He was not going to place any more weight on his shoulders. If George had to disappear, then let him disappear. It was better than reliving Fred’s death over and over and over twenty times. Better than running it through his brain every night like some bizarre sideshow. Better than… oh, Merlin.

Twenty times. The number of times Fred heard the story of his birth. Twenty years old, Percy thought, and the words cracked a jagged line through the center of his skull, and he forced himself to look into Luna’s face.

The words came out thick-sounding and chilly. “I have to work tomorrow. I think I’d better go.”

Before she could reach out a hand to stop him, Percy Apparated away, leaving Luna cross-legged on her bed, her hair unkempt, her lips still pink and swollen from his kiss, gazing at the rumpled spot on her duvet where his still-fragile-looking body had sat.