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Who knows you better than yourself?
The illusion of oneself.
A charm they'd begun to develop. Together. Before two became one.
It had started as a joke: the jumping off point for so many good ideas. Yet it had remained a product they'd never quite worked out how to market.
Bring your fantasies to life! Fred's giggled suggestion.
Now George just had one dream. One wish. One fantasy.
For him to be whole again.
For his missing half to return to him.
For one to be two once more.
To see him again. Just one evening. To laugh. To remember. To forget…
Or at least to visit an echo of what was him.
Who knows you better than yourself?
For an identical twin there is an alternative answer.
George's wand trembled between his fingers. Knotted wood worn smooth over many years. He pointed it at his chest; the tip pressed against the bare skin covering his rapidly beating heart.
He saw him every day, of course.
In every finely polished mirror. In every sunlit window. In every gleaming puddle.
But, the ripples destroyed the image. The windows cracked. The mirrors were speckled with dust.
They were not him.
They were but mere glimpses. An echo of what they'd had. A haunting reminder of what might have been.
Could this charm? This almost laughably simple spell. A spell so simple a second year could easily accomplish it. Could this reverse what war had stolen?
George closed his eyes.
He saw him there too.
Brown eyes sparkling with mischief. Freckles dancing across the bridge of his nose.
“Illusio meus,” he muttered.
“George,” the image, the illusion, said. His jovial voice unchanged. The upward inflection the same as it had been just six months earlier.
Bathed in light, his double stared back at him. Dimpled cheeks. A swoosh of ginger hair across his forehead. Eyebrows quirked in silent question.
“Fred,” George murmured, his voice broken. He'd done it. He'd recreated what war has stolen.
“I'm not…” his double started to respond. But he stopped when George held up his hand.
“For today…” George whispered, his plea desperately laced into every syllable. “Just for today.”
George often pondered what he'd have done if he'd known that moment of irrevocable brokenness was coming tomorrow. How would they have chosen to spend their last night as a whole?
Five years old - snuggled together in a single bed. The duvet their tent as they plotted their next assault on the kitchen cupboards.
Ten - racing around the garden on broomsticks. Beater’s bats aiming bludgers at an unwitting Percy.
Fifteen - sipping smuggled firewhiskey under a blanket. Hushed conversations of potential products.
It was at twenty that that day had finally dawned. Hope clung in the air, dispersing like mist with the dawn. Their radio station crackled into life with whispers, then shouts, of a victorious future.
They'd parted with a joke, words lost to the wind.
That future was won, but the cost. Almost unbearable.
The facsimile of Fred nodded. George flung his arms around his double. Breathing in the scent of him. Of them. Firewhiskey and ash. Happiness and regret.
When it finally came to it. What George would have wanted in that final moment would be to weep his loss into his brother's embrace.
The illusion faded.
George's double was a ghost once more.