He knelt for a while in the slightly damp grass, running his fingers over the carved lettering of Percy's name and wondering how it was possible both to miss someone you'd barely known, and to grow up with someone without ever really learning who they were.  They'd all wished for second chances when the news came, but it's hard to make amends when there are no answers.  Percy had never smiled much anyway, or not at Fred, though maybe there had been something to all the glaring.  Too late to find out.

Rising to stretch, he moved to the spot where he'd likely spent the better part of the past four years, possibly excepting the nights at his flat, that echoing empty place, starting into a bottle like it could solve his problems.  Graves were for the living, he knew.  George was gone and it didn't matter a bit to the dust under the earth where he sat that he was there, but he still came.  He pulled an assortment of things from his pockets, laying them out one by one, memories of things that had been or never would be.  A sugar quill, a broom twig; a dandelion, only slightly crushed, from the field near the Burrow.  One of the gravity-defying spinning tops it had taken Fred almost two years to perfect without his twin's help; only one set of ideas with no bounce to them.

The Whirlagig caught the dying light as he held it up, set it spinning on the narrow, curved top of the stone that marked where half his life lay.  The silence in his head was deafening, and he watched as the top reached the edge and wobbled, skittering off the polished surface onto the grass.  He left it where it fell.