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.

Notes: First of all: Oh my giddy God, Starkiller actually reviewed my story. And she likes it. Oh. My. God. You have to understand, her story, Twin Vice Paranormal Detectives is amazing. Seriously, if you have not read it read it now. I was working on this story when I found it and I was so afraid that mine would sound too similar.

Second of all: Please review! I like them. I like them a lot. Even constructive criticism is very welcome!

Third of all: There are some really amazing stories on here that need to be read! If you haven't found them yet, here's my list of ones that must be read.

Twin Vice Paranormal Detectives by Starkiller

Epiphanies and Ginger Boys by Virginia Wolfe

Fury by Emagen Laile

The Ollivander Children by vifetoile89

The Bottom of the Bottle

"As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

'Now his breath goes,' and some say, 'No.'"

-"A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," by John Donne

Let me tell you something about heartbreak.

Heartbreak isn't the right word for it. It's more of a refraction. If it were a clean break it would be easier. But part keeps on hanging on. Like that science experiment that everyone does in the fourth grade where they stick a straw in a glass of water and hold it up to the light, a sort of disjointedness. Like a bone, half broken but still hanging on. That was it: the halfness. You can't feel like a whole when you're only a half.

Without his brother, George was refracted.

OoOoO

Those who did not wish to scratch past the surface of George Weasley would believe that he was still operating with the same precision as usual. The same tightness in the muscles of his forearm, the same flinch of a vein in his forehead when a sale didn't go how it was supposed to, the same grit of his teeth when he mixed boomslang skin and bubotuber pus and it caused the bottom of his cauldron to burn through. The same ghost of Fred in his face when someone made him grin.

But that was just the surface.

No one questioned the fact that George was never fully okay without his brother's matching laugh, and sly grins. George was gentler, and softer than his brother—his mother might not be able to tell them apart, but George knew himself. He thought it would have been easier if it had been him who'd died; Fred would have gotten over it, eventually, but George…George just couldn't. It was that simple. It still hurt. He didn't let the cracks show through, however, hidden behind a layer of smooth skin, pulling tight across his chin. Everyone thought he was fine. Not great, not having moments of elation, not having dance parties in his living room, but fine. Managing. They had no idea.

The Firewhiskey burned, creating a satisfying path down his throat and he felt his cheeks flush and the drink settle in the bottom of his stomach. He was sure he could feel it making alliances with his stomach acid, like old friends in a pub. George wondered what his mother would say to see him sitting on the half-broke couch—it was entirely possible to fall all the way through the middle seat, something Fred had insisted on keeping to trick unsuspecting visitors—with the fraying blue denim upholstery, taking swigs straight from the twenty-six ounce bottle of Ogden's. George wondered even more what she would say if she saw that it was empty. But then again, he reminded himself, she'd probably look at him the same way she had since the battle; like it hurt her too much to do so. George suspected that like him, Molly wished that it was George, not Fred, who had been stuck underneath the wall.

Missing the weight of a full bottle, George dug around in the cabinets. Everything there was in a perfect set of pairs, but a thin layer of dust had settled over the surface of one set. It was not Fred's that George neglected, but his own. Empty bottles clinked together has George desperately grasped for any type of relief. Feebly sucking at the rim around the bottle of Butterbeer, he threw down his efforts, creating a pile of fractured glass at his knees. He left that there; the pieces were broken, completely separated. He was still only refracted, still hanging on. When the cold night air smacked his already pink cheeks outside, he expected to feel more sober, but only felt more lost as he stumbled around the Leaky Cauldron and travelled through the streets of Muggle London, a labyrinth of oblivion.

OoOoO

It seemed appropriate that the cottage that he was inhabiting was called Wit's End, because Fred was certain that he was on his last nerve. He was so bored. At first he had been interested by the little picture box that the Muggle girl who lived there would tap-tap at and look at random pictures, usually of a swarthy looking lad with floppy black hair and crooked smile on something called Facebook, and had even examined the spines of her Muggle books. What on Earth was a Wuthering Height, and why had he never heard of a place called Mansfield Park? After spying on her when she was in the shower began getting old, not to mention slightly creepy, he had tried to entertain himself by moving things around. Unfortunately his unsubstantial body passed through objects, like breath on a cold day that hung in the air but couldn't change anything. And nobody could see him; he couldn't even prank anyone, except for by passing through them and giving them a shiver-shock, a very sad attempt.

But then, then she started to see him, Fred could tell. The dynamic shifted. When Fred appeared in her bathroom mirror, while she was wrapped in only a towel, he could tell that her eyes had narrowed, and traced the outline of his face with her small index finger.

He may not be able to prank her, but life had gotten much more interesting. Fred broke into his signature grin, the one that would be imprinted on Kat's mind for the rest of her life as it faced her, reflected in her mirror.

OoOoO

It was no surprise that Kat was a lover of words, considering she was a literary allusion herself. Her name – Katherine, in full – was a self fulfilling prophecy: the shrew. Whether her parents had fashioned her after Katherine, the sharp-tongued Paduan maid, or the name had just been coincidentally appropriate, Kat was unsure, but the oppressed Shakespearean heroine had definitely exhibited the same personality. Her mother was the pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar in North America, having moved from Newcastle in Northern England—her mother still proclaimed, with a laugh, that she was from a third world country—to the prestigious Columbia University in New York. Her father, on the other hand, had dropped out of English literature in his third year and pursued his love of cooking, opening what had in her childhood had always been "The Restaurant," but she later learned was actually called The Spark Bistro, (it did much better in New York than its predecessor in Newcastle) a small, romantic restaurant with a world famous chicken fettucine alfredo, which bore her name, having been her favourite dish when she was younger.

But it had been words that had first brought the round-faced Roland Spark with his big belly laugh and the fine-boned, bird-like, unable-to-be-described-in-one-word Andrea Harvey together, particularly the words of The Taming of the Shrew. Roland had been lost in the slippery language, unable to untangle himself from the "thy"s and "thus"s, and Andrea had been the outspoken feminist who would bang her tiny fist against the desk whenever she made a particularly passionate point in ENG356, Shakespeare's Comedies and Problem Plays. They had been placed together as partners, along with a mousy girl with glasses that would slide down her thin nose every few seconds, for a group project, which Kat's father reveled in and Kat's mother detested. The rest, so to speak, was history. Kat, following in her mother's footsteps, could hardly make toast without burning it ("That's how I like it!" her father would exclaim whenever she would hand him a smoking black lump of bread) would always explain when asked why she was in English literature that she'd never seen a papier mache volcano science project that had made her cry the way that Jane Eyre did.

It was Taming of the Shrew that Kat had balanced precariously on the top of her pile of books as she left the library, having been kicked out by the meddlesome bookkeepers; they couldn't leave her in silence for most of the day, as they continually asked her if she needed research help, and then they ushered her out when she was in the middle of an interesting paragraph in her dissertation on the role of education in the play. Typical. The tall stack of books she had gathered in her arms made her feel as if she was swerving back and force, a wholly unsettling sensation, sort of like after she'd left the chicken a tinge pink in her feeble attempt at Fettucine di Katherina. She wasn't expecting to run into someone equally unsteady, though for an entirely different reason, and it felt like the books exploded out of her hands. "'Ey, watch it!" she exclaimed, her Geordie accent coming out particularly strong as the pages flayed out across the sidewalk. She automatically bent down to gather them in her arms, but found it was almost impossible to balance all of the books in the right order, with them having been perfect before.

"Mmph..bul—bugger," Kat's adversary slurred, and she realized that he smelled like her father's hands after his foray into beer brewing, and something spicier which she vaguely recognized as whiskey from a disastrous night after—she shook the thought from her head. But the imprint of him remained on her mind, making her brows furrow. It took a moment for Kat to reach the bleary-eyed man's eyes, and when she did she almost dropped her books again. His bright red hair was flicked with blonde, a summer leftover. It was cut short except for a fringe which fell across his brow, making him look oddly unbalanced. His long eyelashes, framing large brown eyes, were glued together with tears in pointed clusters. Having never seen her ghost's body, Kat didn't realize that he would be…well, short or that he would have sinewy muscles pulling at his t-shirt and they were even visible in the arms of his jacket.

"My ghost," Kat gasped in a whisper. "Who are you? Why are you here? Why are you…real?" she exclaimed in a choked voice.

Her inquiries were answered by him puking all over her shoes.