She awoke to the sound of George's voice and his hand on her forehead. She kept her eyes closed, she thought if she opened them right away she might be sick. She felt like she was spinning.

"Elizabeth?"

"George! What are you doing here? You weren't supposed to be back for two weeks! And who's…blimey, is that…George, you didn't." She heard someone else speaking, but it was a voice Elizabeth didn't recognize.

"Yes, I did. Elizabeth? Wake up."

"Look what you did." The second voiced accused.

"We can fix it in a minute. I have to make sure she's alright. Elizabeth, are you okay?" The world stopped spinning and she opened her eyes to see George and another man looking at her.

"I'm okay." She said, sitting up. She had been lying on the floor of some sort of shop and she looked around as she got up and gasped. Perhaps she wasn't okay after all. She was in the middle of the Weasley's Wizard Wheezes!

It was exactly as she had imagined it, down to the orange paint on the wall. She looked over the things that she had only seen in her mind and thought that perhaps she was still dreaming, but it all looked so real. There were packages of things that shouldn't exist, that couldn't exist, candy that claimed it could turn your friends into different things, love potions, daydream charms and all kinds of other things, though everything was askew at the moment. There were people all over the shop, and all of them were looking at her, including George and the man beside him, who looked exactly like she imagined Ron Weasley to look.

"Are you sure you're okay? I wasn't supposed to put you through that."

"Actually, I think maybe I'm not okay."

"Really? What's wrong?" George asked with concern, looking her over to see if he could see what was hurting her.

"I think I'm seeing things." George looked really worried. He grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the middle of the shop, with Ron following close behind. She noticed that all the windows in the place had been broken, as had most of the glass bottles and plenty of the items that were on the shelves had been knocked over. He took her to a room at the back of the shop and ushered all the people out.

"Does your head hurt? How can you tell if someone has a concussion, Ron?" George looked into her eyes closely.

"I don't know, I'm not a healer." Ron shrugged. Elizabeth started laughing.

"This can't be real." She said. "Who are you people? Is this some sort of Harry Potter reenactment place? Are we at Universal Studios or something?" George and Ron stared at her.

"How do you know who Harry is?" Ron asked her. She laughed harder. Everything suddenly struck her as extremely funny. She was inside a book! It was a dream come true, or maybe just a regular old dream.

"You guys are good." Ron was staring at her as though she were some sort of enigma. To be fair, she did sound a little loopy.

"Ron, why don't you go fix things up front while I talk to her." George told him.

"Okay, but we've got to do something before Hermione finds out. She'll kill me if she finds out what you've done and discovers I've had anything to do with it." Ron left and George directed his attention back to Elizabeth.

"You're not hurt." He said.

"No, I'm not hurt. But I don't understand what's going on. I'm standing in the middle of a fictional place with fictional people."

"I'm not fictional." He said gently.

"George, I've read all the books, I've followed the stories. This can't be real."

"There are books about us?" He asked. And suddenly everything she had been saying about him made sense.

"Yes, of course there are. That's why I'm seeing this. Either I'm hallucinating or you're all putting on a show."

"Elizabeth, I've been telling you for two weeks now that it's your world that's fictional. This is the real world. I thought you were starting to believe me."

"I was until you brought me here. But now I'm wondering if I'm not still asleep. This is a made-up fairy land filled with the most enchanting characters and complicated stories, stories that filled the pages of books, the books that I grew up reading and wished I could be a part of. If it were real, I would have searched for you long ago."

"Well, let me try to convince you. Come with me." He took her hand again and led her back into the main section of the shop where the customers had gone back to their shopping and everything was back in its place. The windows were repaired, the bottles were intact and the items were no longer askew. Her eyes widened as she saw Ron holding his wand and finishing up the last of the tidying up. George pulled out his wand and clean up some of the spilled liquid, making it vanish with a flick of his wand. Then, before she could say anything, George pulled her out the door and into the street, Diagon Alley.

She had dreamed about going to this very street, about buying a wand at Olivander's shop, looking through books at Flourish and Blotts, being measured for robes at Madam Malkin's. And these were no Universal Studios shops, these were the real things. People were moving busily from shop to shop, some had stopped to say hello to friends, others were looking in the windows at merchandise on display. And every shopper was wearing robes of various colors. There were no tourists around, staring at the people in their robes. She was the one out of place in her jeans and tee-shirt.

George took her to the ice-cream shop and bought her a treat and they sat down outside to watch the shoppers.

"Does this look fictional to you?" He asked her gesturing to the world around them.

"It doesn't look real." She smiled, "But I can't deny that it is. But you've been to my world. Didn't that look real to you?"

"It did. But it was I who was able to come to your world. Doesn't that indicate that I'm the one who's real? I jumped into the fictional world."

"Well I'm here now, so that negates your argument. And besides, we don't have magic to help us. If we did, I would have found a way to come to you. And why would a fiction writer want to write about a plain old boring world without magic when they could make up something like this?" She parried.

"Who do you know who could come up with something like this? This is beyond imagination." He answered back. They were both grinning as they argued about who was real and who wasn't when it was clear that the two of them couldn't deny the realness of the person sitting across the table from them.

"I know this isn't real, George Weasley is missing an ear, and you look completely intact to me." It was the one thing that had convinced her that this person across from her was a faux George. The books had said that it couldn't be fixed because it had been cursed off by dark magic.

George pointed his wand at his ear and muttered a few words. His left ear began to shimmer and then disappeared, leaving nothing but a hole. Elizabeth stared at it. "I couldn't walk around in your world with a hole where my ear should have been. I would have been asked some questions that I wouldn't have been able to answer." She was speechless. It really was him.

When Elizabeth had finished her treat, George took her hand again and took her back to his joke shop. Ron was waiting for them.

"What caused that explosion when you arrived, George?"

"Pressure from the long apparition. It happened when I arrived in her world, too. I've got to go see Harry and Ginny. Let's just pretend that you didn't see me, okay?"

"Okay. But I want to hear all about this later." Ron grinned as he looked at the two of them and his eyes lingered on George's hand grasping Elizabeth's. George winked at him and he and Elizabeth walked to the back room.

"Elizabeth, we're going to apparate again, but it won't be as bad as the last time, we don't have to cross from fiction into reality." He warned her.

"Or vice versa?" She asked with one eyebrow raised. He laughed and then they were squeezed into blackness again. George was right, though, this trip was a lot shorter and the pressure didn't seem to be as intense. It ended before Elizabeth had a chance to get used to the feeling.

She looked around once they arrived and they were standing in a comfortable looking room. There were pictures of people who could only be Harry and Ginny all over, the pictures moving, waving and smiling.

"George! I wasn't expecting you back so soon. I've told you repeatedly not to just let yourself in. You can knock just like everyone else." Elizabeth turned and saw Ginny sitting on her couch with a book. Ginny looked over to see Elizabeth and her eyes widened. "George, how could you?"

"I had to." His tone caused Ginny's expression to turn serious.

"Um, just to be clear, he didn't have to, I was fine." Elizabeth told her. Ginny started laughing.

"You must be Elizabeth." She guessed, getting up off the sofa.

"And you must be Ginny." They shook hands.

"I am, though George wasn't supposed to tell you about me, or any of this." She said, glaring at George.

"He didn't." Elizabeth confided. Ginny was about to ask what she meant, but George beat her to the punch.

"She claims that she read all about us in a book. She seems to think that we're the fictional characters and she's the real one."

"Of course I'm real. If you weren't fictional, how would I know that you once dropped a toffy for Harry's cousin which made his tongue grow over two feet in a matter of seconds?" She looked at him smugly.

"Well if you weren't fictional, how would I know that you once jumped into a children's pool that was filled with cooked noodles on a dare?" He laughed at the look on her face which was astonishment mixed with amusement. She was enjoying the argument. Ginny was watching the two of them banter and laugh. Rather than finding the situation amusing as the Elizabeth and George did, she looked like she had something on her mind and it wasn't necessarily good.

"I'd better go get Harry." She said, leaving the two of them to continue talking.

"You once tried to send Harry a toilet seat." Elizabeth reminded him.

"You guilted Leah into doing something called skydiving with you."

"I did not guilt her into it. She wanted to go." She bristled at the sound of the word 'guilted'. He made her sound like some overbearing bully who made Leah do anything she wanted.

"Only after you badgered her for three days."

"She needed something to take her mind off an unpleasant interaction with her father." She tried explaining herself.

"Nothing says distraction like a near death experience."

"It was perfectly safe and I wanted her to know what it feels like to be able to do anything. She doesn't have a lot of self-confidence."

"I know, because of her father."

She wanted to know exactly how much he knew, how much the book explained about Leah, and her for that matter, but Ginny returned accompanied by Harry Potter, the Harry Potter. She felt like she had known him her whole life. Through his books, she had followed him from adventure to adventure, she had witnessed some of the worst moments of his life. She had seen him die and known what death looked like to him. She was in awe of him and it showed as she stared at him when he walked in the room.

"I'm afraid that you're famous in more than just our world, Mate." George teased him. He looked uncomfortable and Elizabeth realized she was staring and looked away.

"Sorry, that was rude."

"Not a problem. If you don't mind if I stare back. I've never met…" He paused, searching for the right word.

"You can say fictional character, she already knows." George laughed. She glared at him.

"George, you weren't supposed to bring her here. We didn't know you could bring her here." Harry told him seriously.

"I know. But it's done now, so we're going to need more of that potion to get her back." Ginny, Harry and George were standing talking and as the conversation progressed, they moved closer together, as though their proximity to one another had some bearing on solving their problem. Elizabeth didn't close ranks with them, she was left a little off to the side, listening to them, feeling a little left out but getting a little insight into what they must have looked like planning George's entry into her world. They were like three co-conspirators in some dastardly plan and she felt like the stolen goods in their evil plot.

"We don't have any more."

"But you had a whole cauldron full."

"Well, we couldn't keep it. If Hermione found out she would have been furious." George nodded.

"We'll just have to make more. Please tell me you haven't lost the instructions."

"No, I have them. I'll get started, but it will take some time." Harry told him.

"Wonderful. I'll just take her to—" George began but Ginny cut him off.

"You can't take her anywhere. What about the statute of secrecy? You're not supposed to show muggles anything."

"I've already taken her on a walk though Diagon Alley. I would have gotten an owl if the ministry had detected something. And I don't know if she counts as a muggle, not being real." He was really enjoying this.

"And what about Angelina?" Harry asked him.

"I do need to talk to her and explain." He said, and this was the first time he didn't look ecstatic about his situation.

"Was this the solution to the…problem, bringing her here?"

"No. We haven't figured that out yet."

"You haven't done anything?" Ginny asked, looking exasperated. The three of them had inched closer together and were now standing in the middle of the room close enough to touch. They were talking as though none of this concerned her and as though she couldn't hear.

"We've changed things, but I don't know if it's for the better or not. The end hasn't changed."

"Does she know?"

"She doesn't, and she's standing right here." Elizabeth said loud enough for them to realize that she hadn't left the room. The three of them jumped and turned to look at her, laughing.

"Sorry about that. You see, we've been planning this adventure for a long time. They're as invested in it as I am." George explained.

"Once we found out what George wanted to do, we were the ones that helped him figure out how to enter your reality." Harry added.

"We've been talking about it for months and to get to see how some of it is playing out, well, it's kind of exciting." Ginny told her. The three of them sat down instead of standing in their little clique. "Would you mind telling us what's changed?"

"You could always look through the book. My copy changed and yours should have, too."

"That would take too long. Just tell us." Harry insisted. George told Ginny and Harry how he and Elizabeth met, with Elizabeth adding a few things every now and then. He told them how she had decided to write her paper right away instead of dragging it out over the next few weeks (for spite) and how that had changed up some interactions with Leah and Ethan.

"One of the nights that Elizabeth was supposed to go out with Leah, Ethan and Matt, she stayed in to do her paper, so Leah and Ethan went out alone. They both had too much to drink and Ethan knocked her down." Harry and Ginny both looked concerned.

"He got physical with her then? He wasn't supposed to."

"I know." George said, looking guilty, as though it had been his fault. And Elizabeth realized that he did think it was his fault. It had been his fault Elizabeth had stayed in. If she had been there, she would have stopped the two of them drinking so heavily and Ethan wouldn't have laid a hand on Leah. "They went out a couple nights later without Elizabeth and I think that Ethan would have hurt her again if I hadn't been changing all his beers to non-alcoholic ones."

"Is that why you left so suddenly that night?" Elizabeth asked him, remembering his sudden departure and how happy he was the next day. He told her he had been able to stop something from happening. Now she knew what he had been doing. He had been trying to keep Leah safe.

"Yes." She was grateful to George for watching out for Leah, but she didn't understand why he didn't just help Elizabeth convince Leah to break up with Ethan sooner. That would have kept Ethan from hurting her completely, and George wouldn't have had to worry about switching out beers. She was about to ask him about his reasoning, but Ginny spoke before Elizabeth had a chance.

"Left suddenly?" Ginny asked.

"Elizabeth was showing me a muggle movie. When it was over, she mentioned that Leah and Ethan had gone out and I went to find them."

"You've known what Ethan is capable of and didn't tell me?" Elizabeth accused him.

"He wasn't supposed to hurt her. Before I interfered and changed things, he didn't hurt her. It wasn't until you refused to go out with them because you were writing your paper that things changed."

"So, this is my fault?" Elizabeth was tormented by the thought that it was her fault that Leah had been exposed to Ethan's violent side. She shouldn't have refused to go out that night. She didn't know that she had been the one keeping Leah safe, if she had known she wouldn't have changed things.

"Of course not. It's mine." George told her. "If I hadn't been there, the story would have gone on the way it was written."

"But then Leah would still be with Ethan, right?"

"Ethan and Leah broke up?" Ginny was shocked and Harry looked as though he was, too.

"Yes." George sighed. "I told you I changed things. I don't have any idea what this will mean for the book. Maybe the whole thing is over already. I just don't know. But, as I said before, the end is still there. I don't think it will tell us the future, the words only change once her reality has changed." He said, nodding at Elizabeth.

"George, I think you just need to tell me what's going on." Elizabeth told him. She had had enough of this tiptoeing around the facts. There were too many things going on that she didn't understand. George, Harry and Ginny all exchanged a look.

"You may as well." Ginny told him. "You've probably changed the whole thing anyway, it's probably going to be a whole different story."

George looked very closely at Elizabeth for a long time. She looked right back at him, her blue eyes matching his brown ones, challenging him, willing him to tell her. Finally, he nodded.

"Alright. Let's go."

"Go where?"

"If I'm going to explain, I want to do it without an audience." Ginny and Harry were disappointed, but they didn't protest. George and Elizabeth stood up to go, George taking her hand and they walked to the door. There was a knock before they could open it to leave. George opened the door, and there stood Hermione Granger. Elizabeth knew it was she, it could be no one else.

"You? What are you doing here?" Hermione asked in a shocked voice. Elizabeth looked behind her, wondering if Hermione might be talking to someone else, but there was no one there. Hermione was looking at her.

"Me?"

"I beg your pardon. You can't be who I thought you were." Hermione looked at George standing right next to her and Harry and Ginny close behind. "Actually, yes you can. Please tell me that you didn't do this, George. Please tell me that this isn't Elizabeth Fairchild and that you didn't bring her here."

"Hermione…"

"How could you?" She demanded. "Do you know what you've done? You've change it. You've changed her. You've messed with things you shouldn't have messed with. If the ministry finds out you could all go to Azkaban."

"Actually, there are no laws against traveling into a book, Hermione, I've looked." Harry told her. This surprised Hermione, but she didn't feel any better.

"Did you help him? Harry, after all you've been through, I would have thought you would want to keep people from using magic the wrong way."

"Why is it wrong?" Ginny asked her. "George wasn't hurting anyone. He didn't tell anyone in the book who he was or what he was doing, except her. He didn't use his magic in plain sight. Have you been mentioned in the book at all, George?" He shook his head, happy to have someone else fighting this fight for him at the moment. "There, you see. He's been careful. The only thing that could be wrong is that the book has changed. It's not the end of the world."

"You changed the book?" Hermione asked George.

"I did. I went to change her ending." He said, looking at Elizabeth. Hermione seemed to soften a little.

"I gave you that book to help you heal, not to send you off to try to do something dangerous and possibly illegal."

"You've known me for years, Hermione. You didn't even consider that I might try to do something dangerous and illegal?" George said, smiling. He knew that she was wearing down. After all, she had done her fair share of dangerous and illegal things.

"But she shouldn't be here. Forgetting that she's a fictional character—"

"Actually, I'm not fictional." Elizabeth interrupted. George grinned at Elizabeth. She wished people would stop saying that.

"Well she's also a muggle and you know we're not supposed to be doing magic in front of her."

"I was just telling Harry and Ginny that the rules don't seem to apply to her. I haven't gotten any owls about magic in front of muggles in regards to her. Perhaps it is because she's from a book. That's kind of magic in its own way." Hermione sat down in one of the comfy arm chairs. She looked back and forth between Elizabeth and George. She knew that it was too late, it had already been done and that yelling was futile.

"You are going to fix this, right?" She asked and George knew that he'd won.

"Of course. Ginny and Harry were just about to get started on the potion that will send us back."

"Alright. Just don't tell her too much about us."

"She already knows nearly everything about us. Apparently, there are books about Harry in her reality." George told her. Hermione put her head in her hand as though everything about the situation was making her tired.

"Yes, as I've already told George numerous times, I'm the real one. The rest of you are just a dream." Elizabeth added.

"We were just about to go. We don't want to keep Harry and Ginny from preparing the potion that will get Elizabeth home." Hermione looked at George suspiciously, but didn't say anything as George took Elizabeth's hand and they left. Once they were outside the house, they apparated back to George's shop and went up to his flat that was located above.

"She took that a lot better than I thought she would." George observed. From all that Elizabeth had read, she had taken it exactly as she would have expected. Hermione had always been someone who loved the idea of following the rules, but had been willing to break them whenever necessary. Perhaps she had stopped breaking rules once she finished at Hogwarts, but in the books she had done her fair share of dangerous and illegal things.

"Alright, so are you going to tell me about what's supposed to happen and why you showed up in the first place?" They sat down on the sofa and George pulled a book out of his back pocket. It had been shrunk so that it fit comfortably and Elizabeth had never noticed he'd had it on him the whole time.

"It will probably be best if you read it yourself." He told her. "Start here." He returned it to its normal size and flipped through to the last third of the book. "I have something that I need to take care of. It shouldn't take to long, I'll be back before you finish." He said and then he left.

She started reading.

He had directed her to the current point in the timeline, where Leah had gone to her mother's house for the weekend. Elizabeth was relieved that Leah was safe while Elizabeth was gone and unable to stand with her. She was surprised to learn that Leah was the main character of the story. She didn't know why, but she had always assumed that she was the main character. Perhaps it was because of the way George talked about her. He knew so many things about her, and he was concentrating on her. But she was secondary to Leah this time. Elizabeth didn't mind, but she didn't understand why George would be so concerned about her and not Leah.

Then she came to the chapter that told about events that happened, or were supposed to happen, the night after graduation.

That night, Leah and Ethan, Matt and Elizabeth go out to celebrate all their hard work. There is too much drinking by everyone, and Elizabeth is unable to stop them, she doesn't want to stop them this time, she feels like they all deserve to celebrate and lets them be, but she keeps to her personal code and drinks water. She wants to make sure that they all make it home safely. She takes Matt home first and then Leah says she wants Ethan to come to their apartment to continue celebrating. They make it back to the apartment where Leah and Ethan get into an argument. Ethan hits her, knocking her into the wall, where she sits, stunned. Elizabeth tells him to stop and that he needs to leave, but he yells at her to get out of the way and tries to go for Leah again. Elizabeth gets in his way and he hits her too, but she gets up and tries to fight him off. Leah is trapped in her own memories of her father beating her and her mother and doesn't move as Ethan takes out his anger on Elizabeth instead of on her. She covers her ears and closes her eyes just as she did when she was younger and doesn't open them until it's too late. She opens her eyes when she hears a crash loud enough to penetrate her covered ears, it's the police who the neighbors had called. They get Ethan off Elizabeth, but she is unresponsive and the paramedics take her to the hospital where she dies a few hours later. Leah is racked with remorse and self-loathing, it's her fault that Elizabeth has died and she vows that she'll never be too weak to stop something like this ever again. It's Elizabeth's death that helps her to grow stronger, to stop letting other people decide her fate and she keeps in the front of her memory all that Elizabeth taught her about being strong, about being the best friend anyone could ask for, about not settling for less because she might think that she deserves less. It's at Elizabeth's funeral that she and Matt start talking and they bond over Elizabeth's death and eventually fall in love.

Elizabeth sat stunned when she finished. George was trying to save her life. He had traveled through realities to keep her from dying even though her death had been the climax of the book, the only possible outcome for such a poignant and moving story. She had wanted to cry reading the ending, not just because it was her own death that she had been reading about, but because the author had given such meaning to it, had finished her story so beautifully that Elizabeth thought that she would be proud to end her story this way, even though the very idea of death scared her terribly. There was no other way this story could end, why had George wanted to change it? Didn't he appreciate the value of such an ending? After all, it was just a story, or it had been until George had jumped into her reality. Now if the story ended this way, it would be a much more personal, much more painful ending because he knew her, they had become friends and she wasn't just some words on a page, she was a real person.

And that's when it hit her.

But it's also terribly, terribly permanent and what we don't read about in books is how it affects the people who aren't the ones who are supposed to be learning a lesson, the other people who loved the character and have to deal with it when they had nothing to learn, they just happened to have lost someone they love.

He had said these words to her while they had been talking about Hemingway, but he was really referring to himself. She knew his history. She knew that he had lost his twin, his best friend, his brother and that must have been the most painful thing a person has to go through. He didn't want to see her die because he had lived through a death himself. She couldn't imagine why he had picked her book to change, though. What had Hermione said, she had given him the book to heal?

She now understood what had been behind George's actions, and she was torn as to what to do. She couldn't let Ethan harm Leah, she just couldn't. She was willing to let the story play out as it had in the book if there was no other way, even though the very idea was terrifying. But now that she and George had become friends, he was going to have to live through another death unless they could find a better way to end it.

Now that she knew what was supposed to happen, she would be able to help George think of something that could change it for the better. They had some time to work on any idea they could come up with. But if they couldn't think of anything? What would she do?

George came back in as she was thinking it over and was surprised to see that she had finished reading.

She must have looked distressed because George asked her, "Are you okay?"

"You've been trying to find a way to save my life." She stated.

"Yes."

"But that ending was so moving."

"I think we can find a way to keep the feeling of the book without you having to…" He didn't want to finish his sentence.

"But why?"

"Why?"

"Why would you want to change a book? If you didn't like the way it ended, you could have just refused to read it again and forgotten about it because it 'wasn't real' as you're so fond of telling me."

"I think because in some ways you remind me of someone."

"Fred?" She asked quietly. He nodded.

"I should have known you'd know about him. Yes, there are things about you that made me miss him more than ever and I thought that it was wrong to take you away from the people you love. I couldn't do anything about Fred, but I thought maybe I could do something about you."

Elizabeth wanted to cry. George was trying to help himself feel better about Fred's death by saving her. She didn't know what to say to him.

"So, the secret is out. What are we going to do to change it? I don't want Leah to miss out on the important things she's supposed to learn through your death, but don't you think there's a better, less painful way for her to learn it?"

"I hope so. But, George, what if there isn't?"

"I refuse to believe that there's nothing we can do. We've already changed things."

"Yeah, for the worse. Ethan wasn't supposed to hurt Leah until graduation and he's already done it. They've broken up. Matt broke up with me. Yes, Leah breaking up with Ethan is a good thing, but it might make the ending of the book impossible now and without the ending, the book has no purpose."

"There has to be a way to fix it." George said optimistically. "We have two weeks until Ethan is supposed to lose it."

"Great. Any ideas?" George couldn't answer. He had been thinking about it non-stop for weeks now and hadn't been able to come up with anything.

"Why don't we put the thinking on hold for a while and go have some lunch." She wanted to think up a way to change the ending right away, but her stomach was rumbling and was not going to be ignored. Besides, they had plenty of time.

"That sounds fun. Unfortunately for you, it's going to have to be your treat. I only have muggle American money on me."

"I suppose I can take care of this one." George grinned. The two of them walked back through the shop. Ron stopped them on their way out.

"George, Hermione heard that you had come back and was looking for you. You might want to consider going into hiding until you can get your friend back." Ron told him.

"She caught up to me at Harry's house, but I think we're okay. She gave me the standard lecture and then decided that it wasn't worth the effort to continue scolding me."

"That's a relief. Where are you off to?"

"Lunch. I wasn't supposed to be back for two weeks, so why don't we just pretend I'm not here and I'll let you carry on taking care of things here." Ron rolled his eyes but didn't protest as he and Elizabeth left.