Title: At Wit's End

Author: TheAudaciousButterfly

Rating: T

Summary: When Kat inherited her uncle's cottage at Wit's End, she was expecting to be sharing it with dust mites and the occasional spider, but instead she finds a ghost with a penchant for watching her in the shower. But her ghost has made a deal with Death, and Kat gets swept up in fixing it before it's too late.

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling is the rightful owner of all things Harry Potter.

The Ghost at Wit's End

"The gracious royal couples

were warm in red and ermine;

their feet were well wrapped up

in the ladies' ermine trains.

They invited Arthur to be

the smallest page at court.

But how could Arthur go,

clutching his tiny lily,

with his eyes shut up so tight

and the roads deep in snow?"

"The First Death in Nova Scotia," by Elizabeth Bishop

It had been raining ever since. Almost like the weather knew.

George's stomach lurched; he was sure if he'd eaten anything that day it would have been on the floor. He was standing in front of his brother, but did not understand why his eyes did not see. He called out his twin's name, but did not understand why his ears could not hear.

Later, after her, George would think about how Muggle poets who tried to write about the pain of being numb, of feeling nothing, were total gits; there is no pain. There is no anything, and there is definitely no poetry in emptiness. Not enough emotion for imagery, diction, syntax (all terms she would teach him).

While everyone else moved on, patted him on the shoulder as they walked past him, wrapped their arms around him in hugs that he did not recognize, George stayed in the same place, in the black room of his mind. If he moved on, if he let himself cry, he would be acknowledging the death of his best friend, his only true friend really, his brother, his twin. Not even a freckle of difference, their mother used to say; to everyone they were almost interchangeable. Not anymore, George reminded himself bitterly. Now it doesn't matter how alike we are; it's never going to bring him back. The thought bit him, acknowledged what he had promised not to, and George shuddered. He didn't know how to be alone, he realized. George had always defined himself by his brother. Without Fred, he was just an idea without the invention, the follower without a lead, the "and George" without the Fred.

The first crack of lightning occurred only an hour after, and after that it was rain. Rain, rain that impedes the growth of bones, that later he would find in his shoes, that weighed down the bottoms of his jeans. It came suddenly, in a heavy sheet that hit so hard it made it difficult for George to stand up; though whether that was the rain, he wasn't sure. If it had been the other way around, Fred would have made a point to not be afraid; George couldn't bother to be like Fred today. What a funny thing, he thought, that people would say how silly it is for me to have to work to be like him.

Eight days later and the rain stopped. George didn't know, anymore, if he preferred the rain.

Four years later.

George traced a finger down the window, following the leftovers of Jack Frost's artwork from the night before. He caught snatches of Harry and Ron's murmurs from the other side of the counter, disjointed phrases that he imbibed languidly, letting them pass over his good ear like murmuring water. George saw his own face in the window, his eyelashes blinking wildly. He thought he saw his reflection wink, and he pulled away from the glass, shocked. George's hand had almost reached the window when a squeaky voice broke him from his delusion.

"You're Harry Potter!" the young boy exclaimed, couldn't be more than six, with a mop of brown hair, cut in the straight line of a bowl; someone had messed up on the sides, making him look like he was tilting his head at all times. "How'd you do it, uh, Mr. Potter, sir?" George looked out the window again, hoping to see his twin's face, but finding only his own. Not a freckle of difference, once. Now, a century's worth of grief, all of the pain felt by every person in every war made a schism between them. George had heard Harry's story before, had learned to tune it out. The story was different this time, though, Harry telling part of it George had never heard before.

"And then, just when I was walking to meet Voldemort," the boy's eyes were wide, as if he wasn't sure that Harry was going to make it out alive, despite the evidence that was right in front of him, "when I knew I was going to die, I realized that the snitch that my old headmaster gave me was the second hallow," Harry's voice had taken on an ominous tone, teasing the child, "the Resurrection Stone. So just when I needed them most, my parents, my godfather, and their best friend came to me—"

"You had the Resurrection Stone?" George asked, his voice cutting through the air like dark poison in a man's veins. The mood was broken, and the little boy and Harry looked up.

Ron's voice from behind him did not break the tension on George's face, nor make him look away from the bespectacled man in front of him, "You've heard this story, George."

"You had the stone?" George repeated, the look on his face not at all resembling the countenance of the giant figure outside of the shop; it was stony, his bottom lip hard and menacing. "You had the stone and you didn't give it to me, you could have brought him back, you could have brought Fred back!" People were beginning to stare as George grabbed the collar of the Boy Who Lived, raising his fist while Harry squinted, not wanting to hurt the distraught twin—no, Harry supposed, it wasn't right to think of him that way, even in his head. It was only Ron's hand wrapped around George's that made the redhead stop, his breath ragged. The little boy was crying, his mother, in a red pillbox hat that was too fancy for shopping, holding him back, with a look of alarm on her face. Surprise hung in the air around the shop; even the Pygmy Puffs were looking up.

"Even if he could have, Fred would never be the same," Ron reminded his brother, his voice gentler; years of being an Auror and victim to George's moods had made him adept at dealing with disaster.

"But at least he'd be here," his voice, soft, broke mid sentence, and then he shook his head. "Get out," George hissed, his voice low and coarse, his eyes meeting his brother's; they had turned so dark that their blue looked almost black, dark ink on strained white. "All of you." The rain outside had turned into fat, bombarding flakes of snow.

It was that day that George decided that no matter what it cost him he would get his brother back.

OoOoO

The smell of salted ice and melted snow on mittens filled the entryway to the bar as Katherine Spark knocked snowflakes off of her boots. She wasn't sure if she preferred this, or the whipping rain that had turned into snow that afternoon; either way, it was the wind that was the worst.

Fuzzy letters on the clock above the bar told her it was 11:43 at night. Girls who couldn't hold their martinis and shots of tequila were already passing out; strong shouldered men supported women swaying from their own ecstasy, a mixture of gin and lust. It was Katherine's perfect time of evening, wedged between joyous revelers and creatures of the night.

"Can I buy you a drink?" a deep voice asked, interrupting her thoughts. Katherine looked up to see a man with a scruffy blonde beard, and hair that hung too long in his eyes. His question was sweaty palmed, too nervous, like she was practice.

"Who are you kidding?" said another voice, positioned behind the guy. He didn't seem to notice. "It's the blonde over at the other side of the bar that he's after, Kat, you're just…a decoy." Katherine's eyes slid over to the figure, the one that only exploded in her brain, taking in the dark curl that hung into his eyes, so different from the blonde in front of her. His eyes, dark, the feature that made him most like something from a Bronte novel, the way one corner of his mouth turned up into a sly grin. The way that when she looked away he was gone again, evanescing into the sounds of cheering football fans, watching old games on the staticky television set in the corner. He isn't real. He isn't real. He isn't real.

"Sorry," Kat exclaimed, her voice strangled as she leapt from her stool, grabbing her coat and hat before heading out the door. She pressed her fingers to her heart, as if making sure it was still there, and was comforted by the steady rhythm.

She didn't understand how someone who wasn't even dead could be haunting her.

OoOoO

As a fourth year literature major at Oxford, Kat was sure that she knew something of death. While John Donne lied at St. Paul's, a spinning ride on the underground away, Kat could recite his lines on death from memory, pick them apart until the words were like bread savaged by famished vultures, until they meant nothing anymore. The greatest messengers of death and grief, the poets, inhabited her favourite corner of the graveyard at Westminster Abbey, not far from her dingy apartment—no, she'd have to remind herself to say flat now. From Dostoyevsky's murder of the old pawnbroker woman to Shakespeare's Danish slaughter, Kat could whip out a quote for mourning families, imprisoned murderers, almost any situation could be assuaged by her literary allusions about death. She was surrounded by it, entrenched in it, writhing in words about death.

Which was why her reaction to the ghost was so strange.

Kat thought she saw a face, but she couldn't be sure if it was a reflection in her head; she already saw ghosts, the ones stamped on the edges of her brain, jagged pages torn from the books of her past. This was different: this one she didn't already know The face was a true ghost's; not one swimming through her memory—whatever part of her brain held that.

Kat dismissed the image. It wasn't until later, when she was pushing her way through the tangling London streets with the expertise of someone who already knew the routine—dodge the lady with the exorbitant hat and slobbering Dalmatian, avoid the suit who appeared to be talking to himself while he juggled two Starbucks coffees—that she saw the face again, not implanted on her kitchen counters or the tired walls of her bedroom, but connected to a man's body. Sterner, more ragged—more haunted, ironically—than her ghost, but his face. Kat ran after him, evading her normal route to stalk after him. "Hey!" she called. "Wait!" But her ghost had already disappeared, faded into the crowd or melted into one of the seedy bars that lined the street like wine-laden soldiers after victory. Bars her other ghosts frequented.

Kat turned around, finding an odd refuge in that across the street, her other ghosts conspired against her, but she could be sure that those were only in her head.