Skin Full of Dust

Summer makes them itch. Sweat drips down their spines like fingers, and their muscles twitch and crawl, needy and restless and hot. They know they aren't supposed to be in here - Mum is afraid they'll hurt themselves (though they're more likely to hurt someone else, truth be told), and Dad thinks they'll break something (they probably will, but they'll know how to fix it) - but that's the point, really, isn't it?

Fred has one knee up on the second shelf, balancing on his toes on the first, rummaging through a box older than he is when he finds it. "Oi, George!" he calls quietly, balancing the box against his chest with one arm and easing himself to the floor.

George stops what he was doing - pocketing little explosive-looking things hidden in a tin box whose lock he's had to finagle - to look. In Fred's hands is a boxy-looking black thing: a big square camera.

"It's Muggle," Fred says, his forehead knitting in concentration as he pokes and prods at the thing. He hits a button and it whirs and clicks, coughing and sputtering and slow with the heat, but definitely working.

They watch with curiosity as it spits a thick sort of photograph - blank? - out of a slot.

"…The fuck?" George screws up his face at the thing, holding it with two fingers. It has a pinkish-coloured haze across it where the image ought to be, and it feels a bit warm. "Rubbish," George mutters impatiently. "It's broken. All the Muggle shite Dad keeps in here is all bollixed-up. Look!" He lets the photo flutter to the floor and reaches into his pocket to show his brother what he's found.

He's just dug out the smoky-smelling things and is laying them across his open palm when Fred reaches out and grabs his wrist. "It works!"

George looks up as Fred bends to retrieve the photo from the ground. The milkiness is fading away, revealing a blurry image of the garage floor. "Like magic, innit?" Fred grins, peering down at it.

George shoves the explosive things back into his pocket and watches. The longer they look, the clearer the image becomes. "It is, a bit," George said. "Doesn't move, but…"

"… it's brilliant anyhow," Fred finishes. He glances up and meets his brother's eyes, something wicked flaring in his own.

George returns the look. "Are you…"

"Yes. What do you…"

"This."

They are laughing before their mouths touch. Their lips come together in a hasty mess, and the camera clicks and spits and clicks and spits and clicks, and they kiss and grin and bite and strip and lick, and when they're done, Fred has a Polaroid stuck to each dirty knee and George's come in his belly, and George has sticky hands and no more breath.

As Fred sends the evidence away in an Incedio blaze, George tucks one photo - both of them in semi-profile, Fred's gaze fixed on the lens; their laughing mouths pressed together at the corners in a half-kiss; their shoulders bare and freckled, George's bearing an angry-looking love mark - into the back pocket of his jeans.

_______________



The night Roxanne is born, it's thundering.

Fred is three years old, and he hates the sound. He's a quiet child, alert and stealthy, always turning up in places he doesn't belong. Already, his father sees something of his namesake in him. He laughs about it, twisting a lock of his son's dark hair around his finger and watching it spring back into place, saying Your Uncle would have adored you. His voice cracks.

At the top of the steps, Fred stands in a slanted shadow and stares with wide eyes into the sitting room. His bedroom has been charmed silent, but out here he can hear his mother: as loud as the thunder, feral, strong. Some part of him senses that he ought to be frightened, but he isn't. He is mesmerized.

He watches his sister enter the world, bloody and shrieking, square into his father's shaking hands. A woman in yellow robes stands by, her own, smaller palms turned up underneath in case there is a catastrophe her hands can halt.

His mother's screams turn into coos, and Roxanne is as quiet as her brother once she is bundled and put to the breast.

A flash of lightning startles George, and he looks up. His eyes lock with his son's. Slowly, he looks back and forth between Fred and Roxanne, his son and his daughter, and faints dead away.

The story is retold at every family gathering for years and years and years. She was already born! they howl. Born and wrapped-up and clean! George laughs along, makes jokes that sound appropriate, but the sound is hollow and as eerie as a storm.

_______________

If Fred is a peculiar child, his sister is downright odd.

She begins throwing magic at random the hour she is born, and it crackles around her almost constantly until she turns three. Her family discerns her mood by the colour of her halo, and it is disconcerting to them to discover that it seems always to vacillate between silver-grey and red, dull and incensed.

Roxanne's cousins avoid her, afraid of her temper - she is prone to tantrums, and her anger shatters juice cups and toys - and her father shakes his head ruefully, helpless. Roxy-baby, he says, Roxy, shhhhhh, but Roxy will not shhhhhh. She screams and screams and screams, and things fall off the walls and break with a satisfying crash, and her mother, in desperation, swats her bottom, harder and harder and harder, until she starts wailing, too, frustrated and guilty, and George covers the hole where his ear used to be and stands powerless in front of his girls.

It ends like this: Angelina shuts Roxanne behind her bedroom door and herself behind her own; George stands between them, staring back and forth, until he chooses his wife, and when the hallway is empty, Fred pads barefoot out of his room and into his sister's.

He puts things into her mouth, one after the other, until she quiets down.

_______________


Roxanne takes to sucking her brother's thumb rather than her own.

George catches them in the sitting room one afternoon. Roxy is four; Freddie is seven. They are leaning over their colouring books, Fred propped on his elbow with his left thumb pressing against the back of his sister's front teeth.

George's heart leaps into the hollow of his throat and threatens to explode right out of it, the breath he is holding pushing dangerously, creating pressure, making him dizzy. He stands and stares at them for almost a full minute before he hollers.

He hollers and hollers and hollers, and his face turns red, and he sweats, and he comes perilously close to crying in front of his children. Fred transfers his thumb into his own mouth and stares, and Roxanne screams right back, pelting her father with crayons.

That night, George goes into his daughter's room, closes the door, and rocks her. She sucks on his t-shirt with her abandoned-kitten mouth and listens to his heart, and he pats her bare back in a rhythm that puts them both to sleep.

He wakes up around two and tucks her under the covers. His kiss lingers against her cheek, and he whispers into her ear, I'm sorry, Roxy-baby. Daddy's sorry. I know how you feel. I know; I know; I know.

_______________

Somewhere along the line, Roxy replaces her brother's thumb with other things: first his other fingers, then his lips, ears, nipples. All of the parts that stick out. It's for comfort, mostly, but sometimes it's a game.

She is no less moody than she was, but she has learned to internalize it. Her outbursts upset her father and enrage her mother, and so she keeps them to herself. When she needs to break things, she goes into her room and does it. Freddie always fixes them for her later. Reparo is the first spell he learns to do with his wand.

Sometimes, he interrupts her in the middle of the chaos, just standing in her doorway staring at her. She always knows he's there; she can feel him, his eyes and his breath and his funny heartbeat. It's a murmur, Mum says. Freddie has a heart murmur. Mum doesn't believe that Roxy can hear it, but Dad does.

When he catches her, he walks over to her slowly and puts out his hands, the way Dad does when he's sorry. He slides his thumb between her lips and lets her decide if that's enough. The older she gets, the more often it's not.

The first time Roxanne sucks her brother off, she is nine and he is twelve. It's her idea. Nothing else works; nothing else will soothe her. She sucks his earlobe raw and his lower lip until it swells to the size of a Snitch, and it doesn't bloody help. She's standing close enough to feel him get hard, and that's what gives her the idea.

Freddie regards her suspiciously when she suggests it, but she knows he's intrigued. He raises his eyebrows in a gesture that reminds her of their Mum - it's that look she gets before she gives in - and Roxy knows she's won.

She starts out just sucking, but pretty soon her brother is rocking back and forth, pushing himself in and out in a stilted rhythm like his messed-up heartbeat, and even though she slaps him when he goes too far and gags her, she kind of likes it. It's better. It's bigger. It fills up her empty mouth.

That is, she likes it until she gets a mouthful of semen, hot and bitter-salty and gross. She spits it onto his bare feet and shoves him back with a shriek, and he looks just as startled by the whole thing as she is.

Sorry, Roxy he says, wide-eyed, and he spells them both clean before he leaves.

_______________

It's seven months before it happens again. This time, Freddie has learned how his body works, and he warns her. She scoots away on her knees, but she isn't quite quick enough, and he comes in her hair.

Roxanne doesn't mind. She watches him from her spot on the floor, and she sees his face scrunch up and fall apart. She decides then that it's her favourite expression of his. When she tells him that, he shakes his head at her and laughs, and then he shoves his hand into her knickers.

He pokes around until she's slippery and sloppy and breathing hard, and then he gets bored and leaves. After he's gone, she slides under the covers and pokes around, too, until she finds a spot she likes. She pretends it's still her brother's fingers, not her own, and she is so surprised by her own orgasm that she shouts out loud, then bites down hard on her own fist to muffle the sound.

The next time he comes to her room, she shows him what she's figured out. Stay still, she tells him, and she grinds herself on one of his hands and sucks on the other. One of his fingers presses into her by accident, and it hurts and it stings but it's inside; it fills her up, so she bites down on him to punish him but rides him hard until she comes, anyway.

_______________


When Roxanne is thirteen, Mum gets sick. She doesn't want to eat, and when she does, it just comes right back up. She's tired all the time. She doesn't have the energy to yell anymore, or to fight with Dad, or to clean up. She barely has the energy to prop a book up on the pillows and read it.

Dad fusses over her, his brow drawn tight and his eyes ghoulish and strange, like the windows of a haunted house. He walks around shhhhing everyone, even in the silence, and makes tea that his wife won't drink, then Vanishes it when it goes cold.

It's during Roxy's third year, in December, when she begins to sleep in her brother's bed. His room is next to their parents', and the walls are thin. She presses her ear to the divide, the plaster cold despite her brother's mediocre warming charms, and listens.

Everything is still. Hollow. Empty.

Freddie throws an arm around her waist and snores into her hair. His cock pokes at her bottom off and on through her sleepless nights, and it reminds her of being small. It reminds her of being safe. It reminds her of Mum not dying.

On the fourth night, she flips over, shimmies under the covers, and takes him into her mouth while he's sleeping. He only half-wakes, slitting his eyes in the dark and seeing nothing but shadows and the bunched-up duvet, and lets her suck him until he's hard enough to drive nails. Roxy makes noise to fill her own ears, humming and groaning against the quiet and wriggling against her own bent knuckles.

In the morning, Roxy wakes to find their father standing in the doorway. Their eyes lock for a second, and all he does is shake his head and walk away. He stays in the bathroom for a long, long time afterward and won't answer Freddie's calls through the door.

When Fred finally Alohomoras the lock, he's just sitting there on the side of the tub, his chin resting on the tip of his wand.


_______________


Mum dies at the end of the summer, six days into Roxy's fifth year at Hogwarts. Roxy comes home.

Mum is dead, and Dad has become his own ghost, and everyone else clucks and cooks and cries. Everyone but Freddie. He watches them all, his arm closed tightly around his sister's shoulders, and says nothing. When the relatives descend like throngs of useless angels, he puts his body between Roxy and the world, and she bites into the fabric of his shirt until they leave.

After the service, nothing is enough. She gags herself on her own hand; she shoves four fingers in and out of herself; she does both at the same time, and she screams in rage at her own futility. She screams and she screams and she screams, and her father sleeps through it, alone in a charmed-silent bedroom.

Freddie comes in, as soundless as always, and watches her writhe like a Crucio victim. She swings wildly at him, and he catches her fists methodically, one after the other after the other, before he presses them down over her head and climbs on top of her.

Louder, he says, his mouth at the shell of her ear. Louder, get it out. He can't hear you, don't worry. Louder, Roxy. Good girl. Louder. He knows what she needs. He always knows.

She wraps her legs around him with her funeral dress rucked over her hips. She's bare underneath, sweaty and wet from her tantrum and her useless masturbation, and her madness focuses itself into directions. Fuck me fuck me fuck me fill me up fuck me fuck me fuck me.

He does. Slow, with his eyes on her face the whole time, inch by inch by inch, as she flails around him. He holds her hips down to keep her from taking too much too soon. She struggles to get her hands free, to smack him and strike him and tell him to move, but he won't let her. It's torture, the slow slide in, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back, the unnecessary gentleness that feels more like punishment.

It takes forever. She screams at him until it turns into begging, and he just watches her. He tries to pull out before he comes, but she bites him viciously and hangs on with her last ounce of strength, her legs hooked around his back, until he spills inside of her. The look on his face is confusion and shock and then nothingness. He slides his fingers over her clit twice, slick with his come, and she has an orgasm that ends in a howl.

He holds her until she falls asleep.


_______________


She goes back to school quickly thereafter. Too soon, everyone says, too soon. But she can't stand the aimless clucking, the pity, the food. The noise.

Freddie Apparates her into Hogsmeade because Dad can no longer focus his magic enough to do it. He walks her inside in silence and kisses her goodbye.

She skips September's period two weeks later, and she tells herself it's stress.

She skips it again in October, and she can no longer lie to herself. Her tits hurt. She falls asleep after lunch almost every day and misses class after class after class. She vomits after she brushes her teeth and can't stand the smell of eggs.

She owls her brother.

Freddie, I'm late.

He owls her back.

Sit tight. I'm coming.


________________


He takes her away for a weekend with permission. Of course, everyone says; of course. All of the eyes turned upon them are full of empathy and helplessness and pity.

They rent a room in Knockturn Alley from a short little witch with eyes so dark that her pupils disappear. She is bored and shifty and doesn't ask them any questions.

Freddie Silences the room, tells Roxy to sleep, and goes shopping.

When she wakes, he is sitting on the bed watching her. There are bottles in neat lines set out on the dresser and a book lying open on the nightstand. Drink, he says.

Roxy does. She downs the entire bottle, and her stomach begins to clench and heave almost immediately. It feels as though she has swallowed acid. Her eyes water and her muscles start to tremble, and Freddie stands over her with his wand drawn and Incants things that she cannot hear or understand above her own agony.

He casts the spell three times, just to be sure, as she jerks and screams and vomits. He Vanishes the mess and holds her hair back, eventually tying it with his Transfigured belt. She goes in and out of consciousness, and is grateful for the break. Every time she wakes again, she is in the circle of her brother's arms, and he is gazing at her, anxious and fretful in ways that she is not used to seeing him.

Though she vomits and weeps and pisses herself, Roxy does not bleed.

They try again the next day, but the results are the same, and when the colour drains from her face and her hair begins to fall out in thick hanks, Fred insists that they stop. He owls the school and tells them that they are taking an extra day, and he spends it feeding her and soothing her and letting her suck on his fingers.

Monday night, they lie down together in the soot-dark room and don't speak. Roxy is drained but cannot sleep, and Fred's worry will not let him, either. Somewhere around three in the morning, Roxy strips down and climbs on top of him. Her exhausted voice is rough and old and desperate, and she tells him to fuck her. Rough, she says. Hard.

He knows what she is trying to do, and he complies.

She grits her teeth and winces when he slams her against the wall. She bends over the dresser and presses her stomach against its edge as he pounds her from behind. She bounces on his cock so hard that she can feel herself swelling and stretching and breaking.

They collapse against one another and sleep through the alarm. In the morning, there is blood on the sheets and on the toilet paper, and her body feels like it has been run over by a hippogryff. Roxy is briefly hopeful.

The blood disappears by Charms.

Roxy's body holds on.


_______________


Freddie comes back twice before Christmas.

They try herbs and potions and hexes, but Roxy's belly begins to swell, a gentle mocking roundness beneath her robes.

When she goes home for the winter holidays, she has to charm the waist of her trousers so that they fit comfortably. She looks pale and wan and drawn, but nobody questions it. Her father barely notices, and the rest of them attribute it to grief, and they rationalize the way that they ignore her by saying that they don't want to upset her further.

She drinks strong eggnog and brandy and takes a fall down the steps at the Burrow.

Her body holds on.


_______________


It's the end of February before anybody really begins to notice. The chatter around Roxy gets louder and louder as the days go on, but she ignores it. The other girls are wary of her, and it works to her advantage.

She tells no one. By now, she has accepted that this baby will be born, but she has no plans for what will happen afterwards. She thinks that it might be born dead, or that it might not live past the first hour or two, and that is what sustains her. It will die, like her mother and her Uncle Fred and her grandfather, and people will gawk at her and feed her and pet her, and that will be that.

One Wednesday afternoon, she is called down to see Nurse Brown. She is blunt and businesslike; so different, Roxy's parents have said, from the way she was before the War, and she asks Roxy flat out if she's pregnant.

Roxy lies.

Nurse Brown rolls her eyes and tells Roxy that she has been around the Quidditch Pitch more than once, and she casts a quick charm across Roxy's belly. It feels warm and wet and strange, and it makes Roxy feel exposed.

Boy, Nurse Brown tells her. Sometime around the beginning of June. Have you been to see an Attendant?

Of course she hasn't. No.

Roxy's father is owled, and Roxy is sent home.


_______________


She refuses to divulge the father.

Her own father rages like she has never seen him rage in his life. Roxy can't believe he's got the energy for it. He spits as he screams; he throws things; he makes demands; he cries in frustration. He reminds Roxy so much of her Mum in those two hours that it is almost uncanny.

It doesn't matter; it doesn't matter; it doesn't matter, she says, over and over and over. Her father is stubborn, but Roxy is worse. She outlasts him. In the end, there is broken glass and a broken family and no information.

Her father throws a heart-shaped bookend -- her Mum's -- through a window and storms out, and Roxy curls up as much as she is still able on the sofa and sucks the corner of a pillow.

Freddie comes down from his bedroom and sits at her feet. They don't touch, just sit in silence.

I love you, Roxy he says finally and then disappears again.


_______________


Her father retreats back into the shop and into his bedroom, and Freddie takes Roxy to her appointments.

He looks healthy! she is told by a young, cheerful-looking Attendant. Won't be long now!

The Attendant looks puzzled when her good news is met by Roxy's stricken, uncomfortable expression. Every time she hears healthy, something inside of her withdraws, pulls back in horror against her spine, makes her knees buckle.

She has tried so hard to kill this thing inside of her, this kicking, spinning, pulsing manifestation of her own sickness. Everything else has died, and this is what persists? THIS?

She kicks the trash bin over on her way out of the office, then turns with her wand drawn and blasts it into ashes. The pretty young Attendant stares after her in horror. Fred tucks his arm around her and escorts her away, muttering indecipherably apologetic things under his breath.

_______________

Nesting, Freddie says it's called. She's nesting. He's heard Grandma Weasley and Aunt Ginny talking about it, and that's what Roxy's doing. It has a name.

It's the middle of May, and she is cleaning everything in sight. The sitting room, the kitchen, the bathroom, even the cellar. Nothing is safe. It gives her something to do, and Roxy keeps hoping for another trip down the stairs or some other unfortunate accident that will knock this wretched thing loose.

Freddie follows her around. He has been fired from his housekeeping job at the Ministry -- not that their father has noticed -- and is home now all the time. He is Roxy's shadow. He says nothing, just stands in various doorways and watches her work.

On a Friday morning, Roxy begins to sort containers of her mother's things in the cellar. They are filled with items from her childhood: stuffed toys, old photographs, Quidditch gear. They are already neatly arranged, but as Roxy opens and rifles through, her curiosity is piqued.

In the last one, there is a jewelry box at the bottom. It is clearly a child's. It's purple with white daisies painted on, and when she opens it up, there is an assortment of plastic, brightly-coloured trinkets. Roxy opens the bottom drawer and tries to pull it out. It's jammed. She tugs and tugs and tugs, then hooks a finger through to remove the object that's obstructing her. It's something papery but thick, and when she finally manages to pull it free, her breaths catches in her throat and her mouth goes dry.

Then she screams.

Her brother rushes to her side and takes the Muggle photograph from her trembling fingers. It's their father and his brother -- Uncle Fred, who died before either of them were born, a hero of the War -- and they are kissing. They are bare-chested, and there is a love bite on one of their shoulders (it is so strange to not be able to tell who is who), and they have mussed-up hair and hooded eyes.

Fred drops the picture. It flutters to the floor and sweeps across Roxanne's bulging belly before settling face-up beside her.

Roxy begins to sob. Fred drops to his knees. Neither can look at the other.

What do we do? Roxy finally asks, her hand on her belly in that protective stance that all pregnant women adopt.

Nothing, Freddie says, and when Roxy looks at him, his eyes are the saddest she has ever seen them. He leans in to her and kisses her with his eyes shut, licking her lips with his sticky-feeling tongue until she opens and sucks him in.


_______________


Labor starts in the evening, though she doesn't realize it right away; it is just tight, pulling, sharp pains that keep Roxy from getting comfortable. At first she thinks it's something she ate, but when she looks at the clock, she sees that they are every few minutes. She cannot sleep, so she wanders the house like a ghost. She debates waking her father or her brother, but decides against it. The silence is comforting.

By four in the morning, she's sweating and has to stop every couple of minutes. She is pacing by her brother's door when the first strong one really hits, and her knees buckle. The noise wakes Fred, and he finds her in the hallway, doubled over as much as she can these days.

He firecalls the Attendant, who arrives within minutes.

It is not an easy delivery. Roxy's shouts draw her father from his dark bedroom, and he stands at the top of the stairs where his son stood fifteen years ago and watched his baby sister enter the world. George, who was so confident and strong for his wife, is now nothing but skin full of dust, and he watches and winces with every contraction, as though he feels them himself.

Freddie stays with her, stoic and quiet, and holds straws and flannels and ice against his sister's lips. She spits them out and shrieks, but he keeps trying.

Roxy reaches eight centimeters, and something snaps. Freddie holds the corner of a flannel to her mouth, and she bites it savagely and spits it at him, hollering You did this motherfucker you did this you did this you did this to me!

Her father's knees collapse and he falls down the stairs.


_______________


When George wakes, there is a Healer present. She is fussing over him, holding a cloth to his forehead and something strong-smelling under his nose.

Across the room, the Attendant is sitting beside Roxy, murmuring gently to her. Freddie is standing behind them, staring down at the blanket in her lap, his mouth a tight line that looks like a slit across his face.

The baby, the Healer says. Don't you want to see the baby?

George shakes his head, no no no no no no no no, over and over, but nobody's listening.

Roxy surrenders her child willingly, reaching out and placing the bundle into the Healer's arms without so much as a second thought. The Healer walks back towards George and leans down.

The baby has been cleaned. His face is bruised from the trauma of birth, and his head is cone-shaped and lopsided. Despite all of this, however, George can see that his skin is white. White as his own. White as his dead brother's. There is hair on his head, faint and damp-looking and red.

When the child opens his eyes, they are eyes that George knows as intimately as his own. There is an expression in them that does not belong on an infant.

George's heart jumps into his throat.

He shoves the baby back into the Healer's arms and vomits over the side of the sofa.