A/N: This is the last really angsty chapter for a while, guys, I promise. Thanks for tagging along with me as long as you have. I had the melody line from Brand New's "Jesus Christ" going through my head when I wrote this. I'm not sure if that helps anything…but I think it's a good mood setter if you happen to own it.

Much Love, K.J.

It had been four days since she had gone to lunch with Oliver, and Katie Bell was back at Alki Beach. This time, however, she was not alone.

"Is that your fiancé?" asked the twenty-something strawberry blonde behind the counter. Though she was obviously older, the coffee house worker seemed to interact with Katie as someone much younger. She figured that the recent sadness in her life had aged her quite dramatically.

At this comment, Katie looked up surprised to find the girl looking pointedly at George who was glancing around the coffee house curiously, seeming particularly interested in the automatic garbage can and was waving his hand back and forth, constantly opening and closing the lid. She shook her head at the girl, almost confused.

"Oh," she flushed, accepting Katie's money and putting it clumsily into the till. "I'm sorry. I just thought…" She let her eyes drift toward the ring on Katie's left hand.

"Oh…" Katie said, understanding. "No…my fiancée was—well, anyway, he passed away. Last month."

The girl, whose name was Mandy, opened her mouth in shock and clutched at her chest. "Oh my God," she said, disbelieving. "I am so sorry. No wonder you look so sad all of the time."

"It's alright," she murmured. "That's his brother," she added off-hand, remembering what had brought about the topic in the first place.

"How terrible!" Mandy said, still reaching at her heart. "But that's so nice of him to come here with you while you're visiting your sister. Was he older or younger than your fiancé?"

"They were twins, actually," Katie said quietly. For some reason, talking to this muggle girl didn't pain her like speaking to so many other people did. It was kind of like explaining to a toddler that something very terrible had happened and having the toddler struggle to give comfort over something that they did not quite understand.

"Well how terrible for him, too, then," Mandy said, pushing over two lattes and patting her on the hand. "I hope everything works out for you two."

"Thanks," Katie said sincerely, looking at the girl in an odd way. She found it strange that she actually seemed to mean everything she said. She shrugged it off and went out into the grey afternoon.

Once they were outside and on the beach, she handed George his cup wordlessly. This was the third time he had joined her in her trips to Seattle and it felt good. There was something about walking next to George and holding his hand that was strangely comforting. Sometimes they sat down and talked until the sun set. These conversations, while still devoid of spirit, were growing increasingly longer and Katie felt good about them.

"You know," George said, breaking the silence as they walked hand-in-hand along the rugged coast. "I never thought there was anything particularly interesting about what Dad did for a living, but now that I'm out in the muggle world a bit, I'm seeing that there's something to it."

Katie smiled faintly. "You mean the automatic garbage can lid?" she asked, slightly amused.

"Absolutely," he said enthusiastically. "It's pretty fascinating, isn't it? The things they can come up with?"

She nodded. "I played with that thing for ages when I first started coming here until people gave me too many funny looks."

"People have always given you funny looks, Kates."

"I wouldn't be talking, George. I'm not the one with a hole in the side of my head."

"Oh, har har. Bugger off, Bell."

Katie laughed lightly and let go of his hand, walking ahead. The wind felt good against her face. They walked apart for a while until she could no longer hear George's footsteps trudging through the sand behind her. She turned around to find him stopped, looking curiously out into the sea.

"You alright?" she asked, squinting into the sunlight. For as grey a day as it was, the sun was still very powerful.

"I'm thinking about reopening the shop, Kates," he said, without turning to look at her. She cocked her head slightly and waited for him to go on. In the past few days that they had spent together, Katie had learned that George had a way of talking out his thought process and that this opening line was merely a starting point for figuring something out that had evidently been weighing on his mind quite a bit lately. She was correct in this assumption; he continued on.

"I mean, I'm not sure how I'll do it yet…but doing nothing is driving me crazy and I think—I think it's what he might have wanted me to do." He turned to look at her and Katie knew that it was now her turn to speak.

"Come here, George," she said quietly, reaching out to take his hand and sitting with him on a piece of driftwood facing the ocean.

"What made you say that?" she asked, releasing his hand and pulling her own inside her jacket sleeves.

George reached inside the pocket of his old brown coat and pulled out a wrinkled piece of parchment. Katie looked at him curiously as he slowly unfolded it and handed it to her. She accepted it and her brow furrowed into a knot as she recognized Fred's sloppy handwriting.

"Where did you get this?" she asked breathlessly, not yet daring to read the small note that was dated a day before his death.

"Found it underneath one of the rungs on my bed," he said simply. "The night you told me about Alicia inviting us out."

Katie nodded, looking down at the note that had apparently brought such a change over the remaining Weasley twin. What she read made her smile.

Dear George,

This is your better half here. That's right, Fred Weasley—everyone's favorite twin. If you're reading this, I'm dead. Funny thought, isn't it? Me being dead. However, because this strange reality may actually come to pass, I've written the following especially for you:

Get off your good-looking (but not quite as good-looking as my own) arse & make something of yourself. I'll not have you wasting away like the bloody tosser I know that you are.

See you in the next life!

Your twin,

Fred

In spite of herself, Katie laughed. "You're right, mate," she said. "I think Fred was trying to tell you something."

George grinned, too. "Yeah," he said. "Though subtly. You know Fred, always the tactful bloke."

Katie smiled and nodded her head. "Wish he would have sent one of these to me," she said suddenly, staring out into the ocean. "I could have used it right about now."

George looked taken aback, but placed an arm around her shoulders. "He loved you, Kates," he whispered fervently. "More than anything. Trust me."

She nodded, shaking herself out of it. "Yeah, I know," she said. "So. Tell me about your terrific plans for Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes."

"Well…" he said slowly, as though doubting the smile that was on her face. "I've heard that Lee's reconsidering his talk radio career, so I thought I might see if he'd be interested—"

"George, that's a great idea!" Katie said a little too enthusiastically. "He'd be a terrific help."

"Yeah…" George said, as though still unsure. "For now, I mean. Ron's agreed to join me in the business once he finishes those mail courses to replace 7th year."

"You've already asked him?" she pressed.

"Oh yeah. Yeah, and he seemed pretty excited about it. That way we could keep it in the family, you know? It's just…"

"Just what?"

"I don't know, Katie. It's going to be so hard."

She looked at him sympathetically, understanding exactly what was going through his mind. It might be alright—amusingly comforting, even—to imagine that Fred had spoken to him from beyond mortality with a playful jibe and a laugh, but the truth was that if it had been George who had died and Fred who lived, Fred would be sitting here with equal emotion. He might even be more lost and distraught over the death of his twin; George had always seemed to have more of a capacity for dealing with complex emotions. Well, for a Weasley twin, anyway.

She sighed, searching her mind out for something that might help. "You know," she said tentatively. "The Daily Prophet doesn't need me in the office near as much as I've been. What if I worked for you part time? I mean, I probably couldn't do much, but I could help set the store up. Get things reorganized, keep books for you…that sort of thing. Just until you're up on your feet?"

George's dismal face seemed to light up at this. "You'd really do that?" He asked imploringly.

"Of course."

"Merlin, Katie, that'd be…that would be brilliant."

She scratched his shoulders and smiled at him. "Let's start first thing Monday," she said. "After our rendezvous with the school folk. We can ask Lee to help us then."

George grinned at her. "Thanks a ton, Kates," he said. "Really. It means a lot. You're the only one I feel that I can really—I dunno—talk to anymore. The only one who doesn't look at me expecting to see someone else." He shrugged it off lightly. "Thanks for that."

She just shrugged with what she hoped was an understanding smile and leaned against his shoulder. The sun was setting, meaning that it was around two in the morning in London. She considered telling George this, but she didn't want to move. The salty air whipped through her dark straightened hair unfeelingly, causing it to curl back up into its natural curl, waves, tresses, and general unruliness. She let it fly about wildly, flapping in her face without raising a hand to restrain it. The constant crashing of the waves against the shore lulled her into thoughts of what might have been and how this conversation would not have been necessary if only he were still…well. Here. The pangs in her stomach returned gradually and her face melted into apathy.

George seemed to guess the direction of her thoughts and after several minutes, he broke the silence.

"Hey," he said softly, causing Katie to sit up and look at him. "You know when he was considering giving you that—" he gestured toward the ring on her finger—"he made me listen to him practice about a thousand times and at one point inadvertently proposed to a Batie Kell…I think he might have been a little nervous, what d'you reckon?"

He smiled lightly at her; he clearly wanted her to join in the small joke with him but for some reason grief reared its ugly head unexpectedly once more.

"I would have said yes anyway," she said, her voice breaking suddenly. "I would have said yes even if he'd forgotten my name entirely."

And as out of the blue as he had broken down those few nights ago, Katie now crashed into George's chest and clung to him as she began the process she had hypothesized would make her human again. George, clearly unprepared for this, nevertheless put his arms around her and patted her on the back awkwardly as she broke down entirely.

At first, no tears would come. She could only shake as her body heaved with dryness, small noises escaping quietly from between her lips. Then, slowly, she felt tears spring to her eyes and she counted them as they rolled down her cheek. One…two…three. Relieved that she had finally broken past her quota of allowable tears, the rest flooded out as she sobbed onto George's chest, clinging tightly to him. And he, to his credit, tightened his grip on her and pulled her up so that she was crying onto the crook of his neck.

"I prayed," Katie said, anguished. "I prayed every night to whatever's…there…that they would just take me. That I could just die too so that I wouldn't have to feel anymore. So that I wouldn't have to hurt so badly anymore. I just wanted to die, so that I wouldn't have to try to go on. And no one knew! Nobody knew because I tried so hard to seem the opposite! I went to work every day for hours so that I wouldn't have to feel anything, but then at night all I wanted to do was go to sleep and just never wake up again. I wanted to die, George, I actually prayed for death. And I still don't know if that's not what I want…"

She burst into a fresh stream of tears and he just stroked her hair and said nothing, allowing her the emotional release that she had sought so hard both to avoid and to find for over a month. He did not feel the urge to say anything; he seemed to know that that wasn't what she wanted. Finally—exhausted--she pulled back and looked up at him, green eyes turned turquoise from her tears.

"Thanks," was all she could find to say as she once more collapsed into his arms, this time falling silent as he redirected her head onto his lap and stroked her cheek softly until she fell asleep, energy clearly wasted from the amount that she had exerted in such a small period of time.

He looked down at her once she was asleep and cleared her face of the dark strands of hair that clung to her cheeks, wet from her tears. He looked out into the sea and continued to gently comb her hair through with his fingers.

"I'm glad you're still here," was all that he whispered as he took her hand and apparated with a small pop back to her apartment where he laid her down in her bed and set her alarm for her, giving her one last small kiss on her left temple before he went home.

And from that moment on, things were different between George Weasley and Katie Bell. They became allies, constantly looking out for the other, their own self-interest dissolved completely.