It’s all over. We’ve lost.

It doesn’t matter whether we win.

Not anymore.

I can hear the shouts of curses, but they’re fuzzy and meaningless.

What do they matter, what does death and life and everything matter, when I don’t have a twin to share it with?

It’s said that twins share things, can feel one another’s pain, and I’ve always said that it’s true. I’ve always been able to feel Fred’s presence, and to be without it—how am I expected to go on?

He’s the funnier one, I think desperately. I was always just along for the ride; he was the one with the jokes and the laughter and it was his idea to open Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, I would never have been able to come up with that on my own.

I want to rage, to scream and hit things and kill people and I want to be scared of these feelings, just to feel something other than this, but I can’t, I only want to, and I’m falling, falling down, because Fred isn’t there to help me up.

He was always there to help me up.

I’ve never been like this. Even when I thought Dad was dead; I was sad, for sure, but I never felt like this, this emptiness where Fred’s supposed to be.

I hold my head in my hands. I’m shaking, I want to cry but I know I can’t, because I can’t let Fred down.

It’s only me. I have to be on my own now, and that thought somehow hurts worse than the death.

I want to die, but I have to go on. I can hear Fred’s voice in my ear, so clear I whip my head around:

“It’s all you now, Georgie. Go get ‘em.”

I close my eyes, breathing deeply, and I take one last look at Fred’s lifeless form. I choke back a scream and I run out into the throng of people, fueled by anger and sadness and rage.

I throw curses and hexes at everything fighting one of my own; it doesn’t matter anymore, Fred is dead, but I have to do my part.

I wonder if it’ll hurt the Death Eaters, like I was hurt, to lose someone, but I know the answer.

No.

Death Eaters don’t have this kind of link, I tell myself, and I can feel my wand slipping from my grip but I just hold it tighter, casting all the curses I can think of.

And then I stop thinking.

I’m a machine, now, just a way to get more of the bad guys dead, and I’m thankfully, amazingly without thought, just me and the wand against them. I know I’m being cursed at, and I’m engaged with that part of my mind—I duck and dodge, weave and run—but I’m actively a part of this fight, for the first time in my life. I’m fueled by rage and hate and anger and the sadness is gone now, blissfully gone.

And it feels fantastic.