Halfhearted

"I made my little niece cry." Beneath the opaque black veil, Katie sounded like she was trying to make light of the situation, trying to lighten her tone and buoy the words to mean less than they do. She was not doing very well.

"You afraid you're going to make me cry?" He was trying to joke, too, but it fell as flat as Katie's attempt and both of them left it where it lay.

"You never know, George. We both know how delicate you can be." He could imagine the smile on her face…well, he could imagine. He wasn't sure if it was under there, not sure what wasunder that veil that made her brother's four-year-old daughter cry. There was a long, empty pause. "It's bad, George," she said, dead serious and with hurt leaking into her voice. "I know I wasn't ever gorgeous…but I was pretty. I could turn a head every once in a while. I didn't frighten small children. I know it's so petty…" she trailed off, and both of them refused to go there. She wanted to acknowledge her petty concerns, nothing when people are missing such integral parts of themselves (like a half, a twin) but George's hand was gentle on Katie's. It's okay to mourn what you've lost. I've lost, but you have too.

Something shifted under the veil, and George thought that maybe he'd just watched her paste a smile on her face. Leaning forward a little and, affecting a lisp, she said to him, "Bellth are bad luck, whath new?"

And he found a smile for her somewhere. She'd been twelve to his thirteen, bleeding from the mouth and missing her front teeth from his bat to her face at her first Quidditch practice. He'd felt sick and apologized profusely as he walked her up to the Infirmary, but she'd almost cheerfully brushed him off (as cheerfully as one could do, with a great bleeding hole in one's head). "Thnot your faulth," she'd whistled through the huge gap in her teeth, jangling her displaced teeth in her hand like dice. "Bellth are bad luck." He'd not really believed her, thinking she was just trying to make him feel better about losing grip on his bat (he never did that) and slinging it straight at her face.

It seemed, however, that Katie was, indeed, somehow very attractive to whatever misfortune was lurking. If someone was injured in a match, good odds it was Katie. If someone mixed up an incantation or botched a potion in class, you could count on it being Katie's partner, practicing on her or having her sample their attempt. Doors were flung open as she walked in front of them, steps disappeared under her feet with a frequency that was statistically improbable, and Peeves seemed to antagonize her with an elevated fury. Of course it had been her who had happened into the loo at The Three Broomsticks at just the right moment, been imperiused to carry that cursed necklace, and had that tiny rip in the fingertip of her glove, thankfully tiny enough to keep her from being killed outright.

She wasn't clumsy or foolish or reckless. She was actually quite graceful, on a broomstick and off, and had more practical sense than most teenaged girls. It wasn't anything she did; things just happened to her, and she bore it all with a bemused sort of smile on her face and a slight shrug as if it say "oh, what now?"

And whatever it was behind the veil was the newest addition to her streak.

"You sure you don't want to make me cry? I'm offering up free and clear, if you can make me cry, I'll give you a year's supply of the daydream charms. I'm quite hard to horrify."

"You mean that's not a year's supply?" she laughed, toeing tidily around his request in a way that firmly shut down any further persistence, pointing at the stack that sat on her bedside table, along with the numerous bouquets of flowers and collections of sweets.

"Only for the undedicated. Efficiently applied, you needn't spend any time in this dreary hospital room at all."

She paused, picking up one of the brightly packaged charms and regarding it; she held it close to her veil, and he imagined she was squinting—she was nearly blind now, the vision entirely gone in one eye and damaged in the other. She hadn't said as much, but he figured her position on the Magpies' reserve team was a dream flown away on the new and now-useless Nova-class Firebolt she'd been so proud of. "Thanks, George. I've been in here too long." Her arms reached out and he edged into them, settling onto the side of her bed and pulling them together.

And it was all new. They'd never been this person for the other, never been this friend. Touch had always been thoughtless, playful and rough before; clap on the shoulder after a rough practice, an ambush tackle near the dressing rooms. It was always motion, never feeling. The motion was gone and George's head spun from standing still.

Reaching under the veil (she froze) his hand found the long, thick fall of her hair across her back (still dirty blonde, he was sure) and tangled in it like an anchor. The hospital smell was sticking to her and it filled his nose a little unpleasantly, but she was warm and soft and needy in his arms. He was not sure how 'needy' was suddenly a positive word (before, it had always been the most damning accusation that could be leveled on a girl) but Katie needed something he could easily give.

He pretended not to notice the darker spots on the veil when they pulled apart, the damp feel of the fabric on his shoulder.

"Let's try one of these, shall we?" she said, her tone too showily sunny to be honest. She held out one of the daydream charms. "They're good for two people, right?"

"They only last half as long…and they sometimes get a bit bizarre, competing dreams and all that," George warned her.

"I'm willing to take that chance," Katie assured him, "If you're willing to stick around with me."

He did, and they spent the afternoon raiding desert islands under a big Caribbean moon—by moonlight because Katie's daydream involved them as vampires and George's buccaneer sun fried them.

She didn't wear the veil in the daydream, but she didn't look like herself, either. Katie daydreamed herself the cool, unnatural sort of beautiful she'd never ever been; her impossibly perfect face glowed undead-ly white as she grinned at him in the moonlight as they waded in to raid the Spanish town and, even as they meandered through their absurd fantasy, her idealized, unreal face made his heart hurt.

Their raid was a roaring success, and they sprinted through the jungle at inhuman speed, Katie dripping in gold and jewels. The cabin on their ship, The Castor, was correspondingly stuffed with treasure chests.

There was, rather awkwardly, a large, suggestive sort of bed set up. "Nice," Katie mused teasingly, looping another strand of pearls around her wrist and digging back into one of the chests.

"I beg your pardon," George said, mock affronted. "My daydream involved manly pirates raiding villages and snatching booty. I think you're the one with some pseudo-sexual vampire fetish."

"Snatching booty," Katie snorted, arranging a gold and emerald band on her too long, too golden, too perfect hair. "That's right you're snatching booty, absconding back to your pirate den of iniquity with buxom wenches and snatching their booty."

"I'd rate that merely 'vaguely inappropriate'," George dismissed her, lounging back with a pina colada. "But extra points for the vocabulary; 'pirate den of iniquity', very nicely utilized." Katie chucked a gold chalice at him. "Hey, careful with that! You don't go tossing around the Holy Grail like it's a cheap bit of pottery!"

"Rate on what? You have a special set of guidelines for inappropriate language?" Katie asked skeptically, the too-large crown slipping sideways.

"Should look into making one, sounds clever," George mused, turning the Holy Grail over in his hands. "Something to rate swear words."

Katie nodded to herself thoughtfully. "Or the Sexual Suggestoscope…like a sneakoscope, but it goes off whenever someone's having inappropriate thoughts."

George burst into laughter. "That has some potential. Fred'll have to hear about that, we can…" he broke off immediately, stricken.

Katie looked at him, her eyes wild and an apology on her perfect pink lips. "No, no," he stalled her, a pained grin on his face. "He was alive for a minute there. It was nice," he admitted.

That was the end of the daydream. They sat in the cabin a while longer, quietly playing around with the treasure, but all the merriment of it was gone. Even Katie's ethereally golden hair seemed to dim.

"Not the most bizarre, but a definitely unique combination," George mused, once they were both firmly planted back in the hospital reality.

"Vampire pirates, we sure don't do things by halves!" Katie replied with put-on cheer, still carefully concealed beneath her rippling black veil.

"Vampirates…should put that on the packaging, that's brilliant!" He grinned at her, his heart hurting again. He didn't know what mask made him sadder; that cold, clean daydream beauty that was anything but his Katiebelle or the blank black sheet that hid her.

"Why don't you take that off?" he asked her suddenly, destroying the spun-sugar façade of light humor they'd been carefully constructing. He gestured at her covered face. "I would never think you're ugly, Katie...you can take off the veil."

She paused long, shifting her weight around in that graceful, fluid way that was all hers, that elegance that translated so well onto the pitch. George's heart seized at a memory: Oliver and Fred watching a twelve-year-old Katie in quiet awe at the Quidditch tryouts. Never seen anyone fly like that, Oliver had managed after a few minutes. Fred had nodded sagely. It's Katie B-elegance.

"Why don't you stop pretending to be all right? I would never think you're weak," was her gentle answer. He stared at her, quite wordless. Her shoulders shrugged smoothly, her strong, graceful hands smoothing the fabric down over her face. "Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for the both of us."

There was that shift of black again, that pasted-on smile hidden away. "Tea should be in soon! I'll share, it's awful!"

He smiled back, and maybe it was a little more sincere than anyone had any reason to hope. And maybe tomorrow was a better day for the truth. They settled back to reconstruct their spun-sugar daydream and left the rest for another day.

This is the file I kept switching over to when I'd get a block on my final paper. Funny how fast something will come together when the alternative is homework.