Something of a sister-story to my Dorcas/Fabian one-shot, White Satin For Mourning. You don't really need it, but it gives a nice depth to this one, I think...Also, randoly craving Christmas (damn £ store, I went in for chocolate and came out eager for Christmas after being attacked by the Christmas section!), so I've been listening to a lot of Christmas carols on my iTunes and this was born. Three or so months too early, but better in September than in February!

And so...

A First and Last Christmas by Firelight

(because Stars Fall is just not getting my angst quota done...)

Molly gives Fred the picture when he is nine years old, and it is hard for her. The picture is precious—her last of her youngest brother, the last picture ever taken of Fabian Prewett.

Fred and George have always been skilled at getting into things, and they find the picture in a box their mum keeps in the chest at the foot of her bed. There are a lot of silly, useless things in there (or so the eight-year-old twins think); a battered, old watch, numerous curls of fine red hair tied with different colored bits of wool, old pictures yellowed with age, letters written in hard, scrawling cursive writing that they can't read.

Fred loves the picture on sight. He knows immediately that the little red-haired baby in it was him—there's that unusually shaped freckle just above his brow, he can always tell himself from his brother in old photographs.

It is a Christmas picture; there is a richly decorated tree in the familiar background of the Burrow's parlor and fairy lights on the mantle. Fred doesn't remember the people in it; when his mother catches him sneaking in to look at it, she cries and explains to him about her little brother, how she loves him and how he is a hero. Fred asks if the man in the picture was her little brother like Ron is his little brother.

She cries harder and Fred is alarmed; mums never cry unless something is terribly wrong.

Yes, she agrees, your Uncle Fabian…is my brother like Ron is your brother. Fred nods, looking back over the picture.

He points to the other figure in the photograph. Is she your sister like Ginny's my sister?

The other person in the photograph is not 'like a Ginny-sister' but she was a sister, too, his mum says proudly, sadly.

Bill and Charlie remember her as 'Aunt Dorie' but she is only Dorcas-Meadowes-and-Uncle-Fabian-Loved-Her to Fred, and he thinks she is beautiful from the moment he lays eyes on her photograph. In the photo, she has a red-plaid ribbon through her golden hair and baby-Fred's in her red-Weasley-jumper-clad arms; she smiles down at the-baby-that-was-Fred while Fabian Prewett stands at her back, sometimes leaning down to press a kiss to the crown of her head. Sometimes they turn towards the camera to smile, or Dorcas turns around to smile lovingly at Fabian, and sometimes the-baby-that-is-Fred reaches up a hand to curl it in her hair and yank.

They seem terribly happy, and Fred feels warm and safe whenever he looks at that picture and tries not to remember the cold day in December when his mum took him to see the grey granite stone carved in with their names; the date next to Uncle Fabian's reads 31 December, 1978.

The picture is of Fred's very first Christmas, and of Dorcas and Fabian's very last.

They were brave, his mother tells him with a fiery pride in her voice that seems dangerously close to tears. His uncles went down like heroes, fighting to the very last and taking most of their murderers with them. Dorcas Meadowes died with the dignity of an empress, Molly says, at the hands of You-Know-Who himself. Fred imagines it, his uncles fighting like comic book heroes in some dark corner, and his almost-aunt regally facing down You-Know-Who. It's Fred's first real experience with death, so he doesn't really know how to imagine anything beyond that.

His mum says that he and George are like their uncles, always into trouble. When he's older, he can recognize the fear underlying her exasperated words. She worries every day that her sons will find that same sort of trouble that her brothers found in that Muggle alleyway in the last few hours of 1978.

Fred never really reconciles the warmth of the people in his photograph to the cold, wet granite his mother showed him that once (and only because he asked). There is no death in his picture, no cold or loss in the golden, firelit faces of his uncle and his love and…him. He cannot help but wonder why people make such monuments, cold and dead things to stand outside above wooden caskets and empty shells.

Fred never goes back to Fabian and Dorcas' grave, though his mother always offers to bring him when she visits them, every year on the last day of December, the last day of the year that was the last day of Fabian's life. He only feels sad there, only feels loss for these people who had loved him and each other so dearly, these people he will never know but for their bright, loving faces in his photograph. He keeps his picture and he looks at it to remember them; he has never felt grief over this, and he is certain that this is how people should remember people who've died.

Molly finds the photograph years after the battle, helping George clean up the room (George is about to be married and they're cleaning out and redecorating the little flat above the Diagon Alley shop as a wedding gift for Katie). It's in a little drawer in Fred's disorganized desk, carefully arranged in amongst bits of something-or-other and canary feathers.

She almost cries, but when she watches Fabian kiss Dorcas' head again, watches Dorcas cuddle up a nine-month-old Fred against her, watches her baby grab a hank of his aunt's hair and shove it in his mouth, she stops.

It was hard to give this up to Fred all those years ago. It is Fabian's last photo, and Dorcas' as well, really (there are a few of her after this, she lived another six months after Fabian had gone, but those photos of her…she wears defeat and broken dreams across her face in all of them and they break Molly's heart) and she treasures it deeply.

It seems as though Fred did, as well.

Molly has hundreds of photographs of Fred, but she puts this one away and treasures it most for the rest of her life. She cannot mourn at his grave; it's far too painful to think of her bright, beautiful son packed away in a box under cold earth. She infinitely prefers to look at his fingerprint-smudged photograph, of Frederick Fabian and his namesake and the brave girl who loved them both.

A little part of Molly is glad that Fred has finally met his uncle, and wonders a little nervously what they're getting up to and what she'll find when she goes to meet them. She hopes Dorcas is keeping an eye on them.