Trinket (the Character is Destiny Remix)
Because of Fred's zip, George is often times believed to be overshadowed by his twin.
From The Sugar Quill
***
No matter what he tries to say, the annoying bastard, don't believe George Weasley when he says going into business hasn't changed him. You have to look hard for the old George Weasley these days - I almost didn't recognize him when he came up the dusty path to the Burrow last week, not even when he got close enough so that I could make his face out. The grey waistcoat, the grey robes, the valise over his shoulder. Red hair, of course, but the rest of him is prosperous and not-twins enough.
The old George Weasley would never have worn anything so nice. I mean, it's true that right now, his cufflinks will turn into butter lumps in your palm if you hold them. The lapels of his robes are coated with a kind of slipping charm so that if you grab them, you can't keep hold of anything for the next half hour or so, but the thing that's different about these practical joke bits and what he used to do is that there's an off switch. If he says the correct counter-charm, things will stop flying out of your hands and settle firmly against your palm. The cufflinks only look like they're turning to liquid and dripping all over your hands, and if you wait long enough, they'll snap back to looking like metal cufflinks.
In fact, George brought me back a trick book, one where you could hide sweets and contraband in the space between the pages, but there wasn't anything like an exploding spine or a transformation charm on the wizarding space in between the pages. There was even real, though terribly dull-looking text on the pages about It was just a nice, sly sort of gift, one that I wouldn't mind lending to a friend to use without explaining that it was a present to me from my brothers.
That's the difference between this George Weasley and the one that used to come home once a month with Fred for a hot meal and have to have Mum do his laundry because they were too tired after a day of work to do their own cleaning charms and too broke to hire somebody to do it for them.
***
It's sort of hard being who we are, doing what we do and standing with who we stand - with all of that in mind, it's hard to realize sometimes that the rest of the wizarding world doesn't believe that there's a war coming on. I catch Mum on the verge of starting to stockpile garden preserves in the cellar every now and then, and I know that Dad has started locking the front door and making sure that the wards on the edge of the Burrow are sealed down tight every night, but you don't catch a word of anything like that in the Prophet. They just expanded the Society column to a full page, and printing the inside page in color, too. I think it's to try and get readers back from the Wizarding Witch Weekly, but really, all in all, it's so ordinary living with Harry that you can almost forget about the scar on his forehead, the scratch across his back, deep and red like a living thing, not the scar over his neck, right where it joins his back.
It looks like something got dug out of his skin there. Sometimes, Harry even touches the back of his neck every now and then, feeling, as if he expects to find something lying there underneath the skin of his neck. Harry did this much more at the beginning of the summer. Much less now.
In fact, what George was coming back to the Burrow to tell was not that he was joining up with the Aurors, like Mum has been half-afraid that he and Fred will do if their joke business goes under, but that he'd just closed the biggest deal that Weasley Wizarding Wheezes has ever seen.
"And why isn't your brother here back to celebrate with us?" Mum said to him, after he told this to her. George's smile didn't even falter for a minute when he said that he's the one who usually takes care of the business end of things.
***
The funny thing is that if you look at the bumps on their heads, Fred is the one who is more suited to business. Hermione has said to me that phrenology is a fraud science, that it has no basis in anything real, and that it's been discredited in the Muggle world for something like a hundred years ago. "It doesn't make any sense," she says, "for you to go from being an upstanding citizen to a criminal just because you bumped your head against the dresser while you were putting your socks on this morning."
Maybe that's true for Muggles, but it's different, though, for wizards. We still believe in phrenology; phrenology works for us in its own way, in a way that's different from how Muggles used to think of it. What Mum's Phineas & Phinn Measuring Cap in the sidecupboard measures when she puts it on our heads is not our characters, but what's going to happen to us. There is no bump on our heads for thievery, but there is a bump for when we're thrown into prison for it; there is no bump for treachery, but the textbooks say that there ought to be bump on the heads of all the ones who will be betrayed to show. It shows how they will be affected; it shows how their lives are to be jolted out of course.
After all, the universe has a certain shape to it. We all have certain destinies, and if there's anywhere that the shape of that destiny going to show up, it's going to be our own bodies. Palmistry, phrenology -- and there's an entire branch of magic devoted to looking at just how the choices we make and the lives we live are correlated to things like the shape of our fingers and the height of our noses.
But the problem with trying to interpret all of this, though, is that lots of things can change the shape of our fingers and the height of our noses. We can smash our hands and end up with extra bulges, and we can get charms to change the shape of our noses, but there's very little you can do to change the shape of your skull. Short of half-bashing your skull in - which would have a rather profound effect on your destiny, don't you think? - there's not much that we can do in life to change the shape of our heads permanently.
Also, our heads change as we get older. Bones fuse, solidify and shift. While you're making the first gurgling little grabs towards being a human being as a little baby, the bones of your head are hardening and stiffening. While you're growing into being human when you're sixteen or seventeen, the bones of your skull are locking hard against each other; when you're thirty and starting your own family, your bones start locking into position, and if your life isn't settled into shape by the time you start your family, if your choices about starting a family don't shape the rest of your life, I don't know what will.
Hermione tells me that this isn't so with Muggles, that the shape of their skulls is much more set, and that therefore, phrenology is total bunk since Muggles are just as human as we are, but then, I asked her whether she had ever had a Muggle doctor look at her skull.
She paused for a minute, then said, "Yes, and he said that two of the joints in my skull were fused, that I was lacking one of the plates."
***
The deal that George sealed was for Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes was with Phineas and Phinn. They're the most famous names in wizarding phrenology - they're the ones who made everything from the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts to the Measuring Cap in our side cupboard. In fact, Mum's eyes practically bugged when George told her, grinning. She'd made George's favorite for dinner that night anyway - just lamb stew, with new carrots out of the garden and first-cull little potatoes cut up even smaller - but you had the feeling that Mum would go out and get dragon steaks, Charlie's bitching notwithstanding, she was so proud of George.
"You can't tell anybody," George says to us. Dad was away, working late at the Ministry, so it was just Mum and me and Harry sitting around the table for dinner. "Neither can you, Ginny," he said, looking at me. "Not even Hermione. I know the two of you are close, but this is top secret and all that. I also figured that my own Mum and sister should know."
"What about Harry?" I say to him then. "Why won't you make him swear your oath of silence?"
"Harry," George says, still grinning. "Harry is the principle backer of Weasley Wizarding Wheezes. He's the one who gave us our start-up capital, you know. We owe our success entirely to him, and I'm certainly not going to dictate terms to him."
***
If you're wondering where Ron was during this dinner, I was wondering too. I don't know where he is these days, either. I haven't seen him ever since school ended. He wasn't in the Gryffindor dorms the morning after the Finishing Feast, and he wasn't at breakfast, nor did he get on the train with us. I saw Harry and Hermione coming up the tower the night of the Finishing Feast with very white faces and Professor McGonagall following after. Harry and Hermione said something to each other as Harry turned off to go to the boy's dorms, and I remember throwing myself at the fifth year girl's dorm that night until I made dents in the wood, trying to get Hermione to open up to me.
She was still inside; I could hear her packing. She was the only girl left in there, as the rest of the girls had finished their packing and had gone down to the Common Room to gossip and enjoy themselves on the only curfew-less night in school. I could hear Hermione crying, too, every once in a while.
When we got home, I half-expected to see Ron sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for us to get back, what with Mum and Dad seeming not to care that he wasn't with us. Mum had aged awfully, though, and Dad was pale around the mouth for weeks after we were back. He worked an enormous lot at the Ministry during that period of time, and I could hear him and Mum talking late into the night every night.
Once, I even heard someone crying at night. At first, I thought it was Ron - the way that the breaths came and the way the voice was screwed up sounded a lot like him when he was crying. I started to get up, to dress quickly and fly to see if it was him come back at home at last, but then I realized that it was Dad, sitting out in the hallway while still wearing his Ministry robes and trying to keep from waking us all up with his sobbing. ***
Here's another night, one where it just so happened that we were all at a late dinner. It just so happened that night that Dad wasn't working at the Ministry, and it just so happened that clock behind my seat in the kitchen, the clock with all of the Weasleys drawn on - it just happened to be striking eight forty, and Mum, who sits across from me at meals, just happened to look up as the tip of the hand that represented Ron bent and fell off.
It had been stuck between "Happy" and "Mortal Peril" for days. I had always wondered why those two things were so close, but they were. Harry set his fork down immediately, and after looking at Mum's white face, Dad climbed up on a stool and brought Ron's hand down off the clock. He fished around on the bottom of the face for a little bit, then picked it up very carefully and handed it down to Mum, who wrapped it up in a bit of kitchen cloth and put a few sealing wards over the package.
I don't know where Mum put it. When I asked her about it, when I asked her when she would be mending the clock, she said that she would do it when she had the time for it.
***
In wizarding phrenology, there's a whole spectrum of different kinds of skulls, and when you try to figure out which group a given skull belongs to, you look at the angle the brown makes with the skull, the curve at the back of the skull, and the shape of the face.
Harry, for example, has a Tiger shaped skull. He has such a strong brow and a full back of the head; I have a Phoenix shaped skull because I've got such a pointy little chin and a full forehead with a flat back. In between the two of us, there are all different kinds of skulls. Percy is a Phoenix like me, but George and Fred both have Dragon skulls, though Fred's skull is definitely more on the Phoenix side, tipped more for sociability, for honesty; George is the one with the bump indicating intelligence, research. Good luck with his hands and his brain. Mum used to touch their skulls and sigh that it wasn't much hope when all a mother had to go on was bumps from them shoving each other down the stairs.
Fred hasn't come home for months. We get letters from both him and George every now and then, to tell us how things are going, but we haven't seen the twins together for a long time now.
I assume that George is in on this too. He doesn't ask where Ron is; he doesn't bring a present back for Ron, and once, I caught him speaking to Harry in a low voice out in the garden. He was gripping Harry's arm tightly, and George was asking Harry something in an insistent sort of way. Harry was refusing to answer. He was shaking his head, and Harry was so pale that I thought he was going to faint out there underneath the chestnut tree.
I think George leaned over and kissed Harry, then. I don't know. I started crying sometime in the middle of that, and I couldn't see too clearly. I'm sorry.
***
Q: How does it feel to know that your brother, your youngest dearest brother has gone over to He-Whose-Name-Must-Not-be-Spoken?
A: Something worse than it feels if it was your best friend who went over, but not nearly as bad as it feels to not be sure because no-one in your family will tell you, when they don't trust you well enough and don't know your loyalty enough well enough to trust you.
And the truth is that the only thing that hurts more than realizing your family doesn't trust you anymore is hearing your father sobbing in the hallway, and the only thing that hurts more than that is when he stops crying for his son who is a traitor and his daughter who might be a traitor. When he starts going to bed steadily and regularly, and when the sounds out in the hallway are a brother -- another brother, not the brother you miss -- padding over to Harry's room in the dead of the night. Your father doesn't cry in the stairwell anymore, but what wakes you up at night, instead, is the creak of floorboards and the close of a door. A happy laugh, quickly smothered, and then silence as the Muffling Charm takes over.
***
Here's another truth for you: I don't know what's going on in my own family because what's left of it, because the remnants of my family, suspect me of still being in league with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Maybe they've discovered something that would make them doubt my loyalty to them, or maybe their reasoning is just that if Ron could do it, why not me? I certainlydid it before. I was in sort of a trance during those days; I lived through most of my second year like it was a dream. These days certainly feel like a dream, and I think that they know the days are passing in a sort of blur of disbelief for me.
I suppose that this is why Mum tilts her head a little to the side to see what I'm writing whenever she around to see that I have a quill in my hand. This may be why Mum has taken to tucking me into bed again at night, and this may be why I'll be sitting by myself, just thinking things, and George will bluster up to me and ask if I want to go out and play some pick-up Quidditch in the back.
George spent two weeks with us at the Burrow, though he didn't spend really all that much time during the days here. Once the sun was up, he'd be Floo'ing back between here and the country-estate that Phineas of Phineas and Phinn owned. I guess that why he came back to live with us; it certainly saved a lot of time in Floo, and he didn't have to go out there every day from London, and at the end of the two weeks, there was a launch party to show off the new product line, to introduce it to everybody in the wizarding world. George went to London for a day in order to coordinate the shipping of the boxes, and I thought that we would see Fred during the party. George said he was there, but working things behind the scenes, and he must have been very far behind the scenes, because we never saw him, not even once.
There was dinner at this party, and afternoon amusements on the lawn, too. Croquet. Flamingoball. Exploding Snap played with Snaps that had the Phinn and Phineas company logo on them in gold, and ice-cream sandwiches that were cut in the P&P shape and balloons in that shape too, as well as just handfuls and handfuls of the products that Phinn and Phineas had come up with in collaboration with Weasley Wizarding Wheezes - little golden balls, in varying sizes according to the size of the animal inside. There were tiny little ones in the ice cubes that went into your drinks, and big, deluxe ones the size of your head as prizes for the carnival games. Everybody got at least one from either the carnival games or from the place setting by your spot at dinner.
They had Phinn & Phineas printed on the outside, with "In partnership with Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes" in circling print around the big P&P logo. And what you did with them was hold them in your hand for a few minutes, so that they could get the sense of you -- it was supposed to be an innovation because these little balls didn't have to go on top of your head or anything. You didn't have to wear a hat and muss up your hair, and even more, these were also supposed to be attuned to your character, and not just your destiny. They were supposed to be able to somehow translate character to destiny by some mysterious, magical proprietary formula. It was going to be a revolution in phrenology; it was a new day for phrenology; it was a new day for wizardkind.
I still got a little phoenix, though. About the size of my hand, and all gold and red. It perched on my shoulder all night and poked its face into my hair. Dad got one of the new types, though. A griffon, which pleased him immensely; he kept it in his robe pocket, and he kept feeding it bits of food through the evening. Mum got a griffon too, though hers was somewhat shyer and had to be coaxed out to meet people.
George, on the other hand, went up to one of those carnival games and won a ball for Harry. As if Harry weren't perfectly capable of winning one for himself, but you should have seen the look on his face anyway when he popped open the ball and out came a stuffed tiger. It the size of a small horse, but stuffed, and with rolling glass eyes. The little phrenology ball popped open in his hand with this little blare of trumpets and fountain of confetti even though the tiger wasn't very animated. It was supposed to be one of those plushes that you just hug and keep on your bed even though it takes up half the space, so it wasn't very different from Muggle toys, but Harry was staring at it and at George in equal parts anyway.
At the end of the party, there were fireworks. Lots and lots of fireworks, enough to light up the sky, and in every color that fireworks come in except for green, presumably because they didn't want to remind anybody of the Morsmordre. So lots of pinwheels in red and gold, sparking pink champagne fountains, and cluster fireworks in the shape of tigers and phoenixes and dragons. There was even one firework that rained down little paper-wrapped candies over the spectators.
No green. No Morsmordre. No cluster bombs of the phrenology type that goes between the phoenix and the dragon - the snake. No snakes riding around the wrists of the people at the party, and no more Ron, not ever. Still, though, there were a couple of times where I thought I saw Ron's face up in the fireworks. A couple times more, I thought I saw his face again in the sparks falling down onto the trees, and while everybody was leaving the party, I could have sworn I saw his face looking at me from the shadows of underneath the bushes.
Hermione is in France, supposedly. I get no letters from her. She used to write me regularly in the summers, but she hasn't written me once since the end of school. I asked Harry once where in France she was staying because maybe we could go visit her one of these days, but he got this guarded look in his eyes, and he said that she was probably busy with family - it's that he won't tell me. He knows, though. I see him sending off secured owls sometimes at night when he thinks that all of us, even George, have gone asleep.
Ron's skull was shaped phoenix, not a snake. Weasleys tend to phoenixes, not snakes, and Harry is most definitely a tiger if ever there was one. He's got the coloring, the carriage, the quickness and the bravery. Mum is definitely a Tiger too, and I don't think there's anybody living at the Burrow now who has a snake-shaped skull. George's little phrenology charms certainly worked, and I didn't see anybody that I knew with a snake.
Nevertheless, that night, in the carriage home, rolling over the summer countryside with the windows open after that party, the stars were out, and the fields between the Phinn place and the Burrow were silent except when the wind blew, and the wheels of the carriage were silvered with moonlight -- it was fine and beautiful outside, but nevertheless, every time I would look inside to see Mum and Dad nodding off in the corner and Harry and George sitting in the other, talking about something in low voices, Harry with that toy tiger still on his knee -- nevertheless, I swear I saw the snake written on each of them.