Rare Pair Shorts

This is amazing in so many respects--the beauty of the language, the depth and intensity, George's detachedness, and whenever you think that it can't get any sadder you deliver yet another punch in the gut by excellently-placed one-liners or bits of speech or unexpected humour that make you choke rather than laugh.

I love it when someone takes the characters that Rowling mostly presented for laughs and shows us their other side. And especially for George it makes so much sense--clowns are never just that, only one may sometimes have to dig to find the depth. Thank you for taking up the shovel!

The second person made so much sense here--not just because of the distance but also because perhaps the You is all that's left to George since he's lost part of his I (there's a reason he still calls him Gred, isn't there?) I also love the rhythm of this piece, the sentence structures, the mantra-like repetitions and the alternation between long and short phrases.

It's difficult to come up with bits I loved especially, but here are some:
--The entire beginning. Wonderfully visual and so deceptively lovely until the sucker-punch one-liner.
-–"when the last customer is gone and the last laugh is laughed" -- Love the parallel (laugh=work), and the effective alliteration
--"the line between trouble and Trouble at the Burrow, the line between light and dark anywhere."
--"You know this kid -- not his name, but his type. He is one of Nature's victims, and he can no more defend himself against the Twins and Marauders of the world than Fred could stand up to a collapsing wall."
--"Unlike your family, she doesn't need you to be fine; unlike your family, she can see you -- can see you, not a replacement Fred. So she watched you and frowned." This tells us so much about the Weasleys and about McGonagall. Such an IC reaction, and so plausible that she'd understand him better than Mollywobbles.
--"To sneak up behind Dead Fred and say, 'Hem-hem, Gred, old boy. Guess who's been dying to see you?'" Another punch in the gut. Such a thing Forge would do, and so painful.
--"(A tiny voice sometimes whispers that you don't even know if he's real, but you rarely let yourself listen to this voice.)" Loved that tiny doubt whether it's the magic or his psyche that makes him see Snape.
--"But if Harry's mum was already dead, then why wasn't Snape (dead as well) now reunited with her?" That parenthesis is amazing. The sobriety of the thrown-in reference to Snape's being dead makes it all the more effective.
--"You're weak, but so is Snape, and between you, you can be almost whole again." And they both look for something the other one has.
--"Weasley. What do you want?" Great way to end this.
And even though I have a preference, I love how you leave "any one or none of them" open.

Brilliant!