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On Magic and Beds

Summary:

Fred and George had always shared a bed, they didn't know why they thought it would be any different at Hogwarts.

Notes:

The prompt Trope I had was 'Only One Bed' and exactly 571 words in length.
Many thanks to my beta SMP for looking over this for me!

Work Text:

Twins were rare in magical families. They were more common in those families who chose to bring in people with non-magical blood. While most Twins born to magical parents had magic themselves, Magical Twins shared thoughts and magic freely, often described as one person split into two bodies.

They were so rare that often their families wouldn’t know that there was anything unusual about their children while at the same time being unable to tell the two apart.

Magical Twins were equal and opposite to each other, where one flourished, the other struggled. Most would rarely be seen apart from their twin, and if they were, they would know what the other had experienced even hundreds of miles apart.

This duality would occasionally have unusual interactions with wards and detection spells, especially those that saw a thing’s magic and not its physical presence. The Hogwarts Wards, centuries old and almost sentient, when a pair of Magical Twins attended, they would be counted as one single student and one bed provided, unless the exceptionally rare but still possible occurrence of them being sorted into different houses. 

For Fred and George Weasley, the second set of Magical Twins to be born into the Prewitt family in a century, they were used to sharing a bed. They were the fourth and fifth born sons in a family of eight, they had very quickly become one person within their family’s minds, always together. It had been easier for them to share the crib that had been used by each of their older brothers in turn and, as their younger siblings were born, for their parents to find one extra bed for the Twins to share. 

The oddest thing about their dorm at Hogwarts was sharing the room with a third, even if Lee had his own bed, the necessary adjustments to the space to allow for their experiments but not disturb him were jarring at the beginning.

As the year passed, they slowly brought Lee into their plans and their ideas. And Lee, in turn, folded them into his own.

Things began to change again during their third year when the lack of individual beds became problematic. As puberty settled in, it wasn’t that they were uncomfortable but sometimes it felt like there wasn't enough space in the bed for both of them together. The beds at Hogwarts were all enchanted to be resistant to spells, even the curtains could only be affected by certain spells, which meant they couldn’t even expand the beds for extra room. The three of them also slowly got closer to each other, Lee slowly becoming more closely entwined with the Twins. He suggested that they swap, that they could each take the single bed and the other pair could share. 

Their arrangement worked and the trio slowly grew closer, experimenting with each other as often as they did with potions and charms. It took almost two years to do, but, part way through their fifth year, they managed to take down enough of the enchantments on the beds that they could enlarge their beds. Instead, they moved the beds together and merged them into one. They kept the arrangement the rest of their time at Hogwarts, though Lee found the bed cold when the Twins fled. When they established a flat above their shop, they continued on together, it never occurred to them to sleep apart. Until they couldn’t.