"Sometimes you have to really fuck up to get better," she tells him over the noise.

"What happens when you get better?" He doesn't know what she's doing, why she's here, handing him a beer and why is she here she shouldn't be here-

"Who says that I'm getting better?" She laughs and watches the light dance off the windows.

"Ace! Look out the window!"

Georgie climbs off her bed, book in hand, and looks down. Charlie is standing underneath her window, smiling.

She rolls her eyes and pushes the window open. "You know that you're a huge fucking cliché, right?"

"Yeah, I know." Charlie squints his eyes and shrugs his shoulders. "I forgot my rocks."

She throws her book at him instead and goes back to bed.

He wakes up in an unfamiliar but not uncomfortable bed and finds, to his surprise, his hand is held by another, smaller one: Georgie's. He looks at their joined hands for a moment, and then he wakes her up.

Charlie is nothing if not selfless; he's the sailor, the savior, the scion of success, and a half-dozen other words that start with the letter s. But when one considers a small blonde boy, too big for his skin and too scared to grow old, crashing into the waves with his grandfather by his side, he loses some of his superiority in being just a boy.

His grandfather was the original Charles Bingley, and sometimes Charlie wondered if his problems stemmed from him being Charles Bingley the Second, if words made a difference in a life.

Two twins by name, two relatives by blood, two people who didn't have enough time: the former haunted Charlie for his whole life. But then again, no one has enough time, and maybe we're all cursed.

Georgie asked him, "What if curses and magic were real? What if everything meant something?" She was nine. He was twelve.

And Charlie, poor Charlie, thought that he was better than these questions, and he was older, and she was just a girl, so he said, "That's the dumbest thing ever," and forgot about everything meaning something. Oh, how he broke her heart. (But she'd get the last laugh, even though it was really more of a whisper.)

"Ace," he whispers, so quietly, and everything was so loud, where was the quiet in the world, it was here, in this hospital, in her room, but it's not her room anymore, dead people don't have things, they're dead, they're dead, they're dead they're dead-

"Mr. Bingley? I'm sorry- were you close to Ms. Darcy?"

Charlie leans his head against hers and chokes back something in his throat that feels a lot like a bullet and a little bit like love, but he's not sure anymore.

At the funeral he stands next to Will and does his best to be there for him. It's a hard thing to do, being there, because it's never really specified but everyone says that's what you should do when someone dies, just be there for them, but how can you be there for someone who's not anymore? Do you reach up and pull them back down to you, or do you float away with them?

He does his best to be there for Will, and it's not enough, nothing would ever be enough, and he tries very hard not to think of time, slipping through his eyelids and spilling onto the ground.

When the usher offers him a tissue, he wants to vomit.

She liked to read the last words of books, to know how something ended after it had begun.

Charlie didn't.

He'd never found an ending that felt like living, like light streaming through cracked windows that shattered when you held them. Everything was too fragile, and an ending was never enough, but that's how stories go.

And besides, Charlie was never really much of a reader.

Author's Note:

My original Georgiana piece is kicking my ass right now. I hate every word of it I write, but oddly enough, I love this piece.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this, and if you haven't read It's Only Love, you should.

I enjoy shameless self-promotion.

The title comes from the song Mistaken for Strangers by the National. It's gorgeous.