George wasn't sure if she was awake or just hallucinating, her jet lag was that thick. Good thing she had Sydney with her or George would have gotten lost somewhere between the airport and Brooklyn. Surely Sydney was just as jetlagged as George was but somehow, between the two of them and their few remaining brain cells, they were able to carry their two large black boxes of recording and music-producing equipment up the narrow staircase of Anton Kaufman's Brooklyn studio, Trick Studios, to figure out which room Anton meant for her to use as storage, place the boxes in said storage room and then leave the studio locked up behind them.

Anton Kaufman ended up giving George several gifts that year. Life-changing, life-altering gifts. The first? A chance. He listened to Felix's album. That alone would have been enough. But Anton did more than just that. He also gave George incredible advice, feedback, and invaluable critiques in his response to Felix's album. Again. That would have been enough. George wouldn't have asked for anything else from THE Anton Kaufman.

But Anton liked George, he wanted to see her succeed. And so, the single most important gift Anton could have ever given George, the one thing she didn't even know she needed until he offered it to her, was space. More specifically, storage space, a place in New York where she could store her equipment. George wouldn't have had anywhere else to put it otherwise, not as the only Burns left in New York.

Neither George nor Sydney said a word between them during their trek from the airport to the studio and then back across the river to the Village. Sydney didn't speak much as it was, a plus in George's book as far as Sydney working as her assistant/travel manager went. Because of the drowsy silence, there was no discussion about whether or not Sydney was going back to George's apartment with her in the cab ride across the bridge. George barely had the energy to blink as she followed Sydney and their luggage up the three flights of stairs to end up in front of the door that led into George's childhood home.

If Sydney had anything to say about how the apartment looked (sparse, empty, perfectly staged for a realtor to show it to a multitude of clients), she didn't bother. Instead, she stored the suitcases in the corner near the dining room table, took off her jacket, grabbed the throw blanket that had been placed perfectly over the arm of the long gray couch, and fell straight into its deep cushions, sleep falling right on top of her.

George didn't have enough brain power to look around at what was now her apartment. She didn't see the decorations that were unfamiliar or notice the complete absence of any trace of her or her family. The apartment was devoid of personality. But George was devoid of sleep. Sleep won.

George's feet led her to her room down the hall, the one right next to what used to be her dad's office. They led her past the first bed and threw her down onto the second, not even pausing to realize she could sleep in the first bed if she wanted to, Lily didn't live here anywhere. This room was hers and hers alone, for the first time in George's entire life.

George didn't have any mental awareness to think about any of this. If asked, she wouldn't have been able to tell you where she had flown in from so early in the morning, or even when the last time she had slept in a bed that wasn't on a tour bus or in a hotel room was. She would have been too busy falling asleep on top of her bed covers, fully clothed, shoes still on, her hair still in a ponytail. The world faded to black as soon as George's head hit her pillow. And as she fell asleep on that early Christmas Eve morning, the city outside her apartment started to wake up.

*

The first thing George was aware of when she finally did wake up was the smell of coffee. That one smell kept her from falling back asleep. The second thing George was aware of was a tight pulling on one specific part of her scalp. It hurt. A lot. George's hand slowly made its way to her head blind as George had yet to open her eyes. She found a mess of hair waiting for her. That got George up. She slowly woke up while untangling the mess sleeping in a ponytail had made. There was sound coming from the kitchen and George made her way in that direction, finally pulling off her sneakers just inside her room, letting her tired feet free for the first time in over twenty-four hours. Sydney was the source of half the noise, the grocery bags on the kitchen counter the other half. Sydney nodded a greeting and George managed a grunt/nod in reply.

Outside the sun had already set. The only lights keeping the dark from consuming the city entirely were the row of street lamps below and the headlights of a million cars always driving along the busy avenue four floors below.

Sydney placed a bowl, a spoon, a new box of cereal, and a fresh gallon of milk on the counter right in front of where George had paused to rest and catch her breath from the long trek from her room to the kitchen. George poured the cereal and the milk without needing to be told to, a good sign that she was slowly returning to Earth. She took her breakfast/lunch/early dinner to the sofa and sat down in its deep, comfy depths, nearly getting swallowed up into the expensive fabric.

Her eyes stared unseeing at the building across the way as her hand moved her spoon from bowl to mouth. There were lights on in the apartments across the street and not just overhead lighting. There were Christmas trees in more than a dozen windows and the lucky few with a balcony or fire escape out front had wrapped the old rusted iron railing in various shades of Christmas lights.

That's right, George remembered. It's Christmas Eve.

It only spoke to her lack of awareness due to jet lag and the speed at which she had paced herself for the last year that George thought only that it was Christmas Eve and not her birthday.

It had been a long year. A small part of George's barely awake brain took stock of everything that had happened since her last Christmas Eve since she had fallen asleep on Felix's couch in front of a low-burning fire.

Her internship at Willow Studios had ended. She celebrated the ending of it with Felix at Andre's pub while the rest of the interns went further downtown to celebrate. Andre's sister, Benjamina, kept them company most of the night, happy to hear all the crazy stories from the last five months. Felix made sure to take the night off to spend it with George only to end up spending the night at the pub anyway.

George and Felix got the chance to play Mac Felix's album. George worked tirelessly to get it as good as she was able before the internship ended and it paid off. Mac liked it. He wanted to show it to some people. Anton liked it too and had also promised to show it to some people.

The moment with Felix in the Willow Studios lobby, the two of them jumping up and down, hugging, screaming, going out of their minds with amazement, exhaustion, and excitement was one of George's last days at Willow and her last moment with Felix. Life got busy and before she knew it, she was headed off to Amsterdam where she had another producing internship lined up, this one in part thanks to Jayden's recommendation. Everything happened so fast George didn't even have the chance to say goodbye to Felix. The best she could do was call him on her way to the airport.

When George finally made her way back to New York, for the first time in a very long time, she found an empty apartment waiting for her. She had forgotten for a second that no one in her family lived there anymore. Julien had been the last one and now he too lived in LA.

George wasn't in New York long enough to fully process what the perfectly staged, empty family apartment meant as there was a job offer waiting for her in LA. Mac and Anton had kept their word. They had sent Felix's album on and it had ended up on the desk of the president of Concept Records, Lionel Harrington, Julien's old bandmate and now boss. They had a recording contract for Felix and a proposition for George.

If Lionel didn't know George was Julien's daughter before she walked into the conference room at Concept Records HQ (her name on the producing credits of Felix's album reading George Briggs), he did as soon as he saw her. She couldn't change her face or the fact that she looked like a young, female Julien. George waited as shock, awe, and outrage spread down the table of board members. Lionel was the only one who didn't seem to mind the family connection and still offered George a job, a job that would send her back on the road touring, a job that was to set her up with her dream career.

A music producer on retainer, that was the offer. Not a freelancer like the rest of the music producers George knew. A secure position at the label, with projects passed on to her through her acting artist manager, Julien himself. It sounded too good to be true. It was a prototype, Lionel had made that very clear. This kind of contract, this kind of agreement, wasn't common in the industry but Concept didn't want to lose out on the chance to foster the talent of the next big music producer (Lionel's words exactly). Six months was the probation period, a chance for both parties to try things out, and see how they liked the system.

George signed a temporary contract on a Friday in June and by that Sunday was headed back out on tour.

It was easy, getting back into touring life. Easier than George expected, falling back into a routine. Things were so familiar, so natural, it was as if she had never left. When George headed out, Sydney went with her. Julien called her out of a job she had taken at a private security firm to go with George as her assistant and travel manager. This was how Julien managed to ease his worry at the thought of his daughter back on the road again without him, all on her own.

This time touring, George was officially with the talent. She was setting up rooms she had just barely been allowed to be in only a year before. She was now running the songwriting sessions she had been overjoyed to just sit and listen in on the last time around.

The system Concept had in mind, the vision Lionel had for George's particular set of skills worked. George knew how to produce, she knew how to write a song and she could do whatever needed to be done anywhere in the world.

Concept and Lionel were thrilled. Julien was taking a red-eye that night from LA to New York to spend Christmas Day with George and flying with him was the final contract from Concept, an exclusive seven-year deal that was going to set George's future in stone.

George had only seen Felix once since London. One of his meetings with Concept ended up being scheduled right after hers. They ran into each other in the lobby, George on her way out, Felix on his way up. They quickly caught up in the time it took the elevator to descend and then Felix was off, riding up to the top story. George wasn't surprised to find their old friend, Benjamina, with him. Felix explained that he had wanted someone he could trust with him on this and Benjamina had stepped up, excited to put her new law degree to good use.

George decided to wait in the lobby until Felix was done, having nowhere other than Vivian's to go. She wanted to see how it had gone. Felix was beaming as he exited the elevator and when he spotted George waiting for him, he raced across the lobby, grabbed her around the middle, and swung her around.

George wasn't sure which direction was up and which was down for a long moment. Her heart refused to slow down even after Felix put her down. It was pounding so loud she missed most of what he said in a rapid-fire update but she got the basics of it from his unbreakable smile. She suggested going to dinner, the three of them and Sydney. Lionel showed up just then and took Felix out to dinner instead. The last time George saw Felix was as he climbed into the back of a large black SUV and headed out into the LA evening.

George couldn't help thinking about Felix. She thought about him a lot, especially on late nights in weird hotels with no one around, when she found herself homesick for those late nights back at Willow. She hadn't contacted him since she had seen him in LA. She didn't know what to say. Their careers were taking them down two separate paths and her schedule was so busy she knew there was no way they could meet up.

But it was Christmas time, she was back home in her city, their city. She wondered if he was home for the holidays, whether or not he would have time to drive out with his family to New Jersey and spend the day with his abuela. She wondered if he would text her to say happy birthday or even just Merry Christmas but then she had to remember whether or not she had even told him Christmas Eve was her birthday. She had never told him how she felt about things between them and so she could only wonder how he felt about her, then, now. She wondered a lot of things.

"We should get a Christmas tree."

George would have jumped at Sydney's words if she'd had the energy. She had been aware on some level that Sydney had brought two cups of coffee from the kitchen and sat down next to her on the couch, placing the second one in front of George. It was cold when George reached out to grab it, speaking volumes of the time that had passed since neither of them had said anything.

George looked over at her now constant companion. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a sleek bun as it always was, her brown eyes inscrutable. There was a certain amount of emotion and thought that George was convinced she could read now in Sydney's usual blank expression after having spent the past six months together. Sydney was looking out at the same apartments George had been blindly staring at. It wasn't hard to guess where she had gotten the idea of a Christmas tree from.

"Sure," George said, through a sigh. "Why not?"

They both sat there in silence for another long moment. Sydney was the first to get up and extended a hand to George when she did. They were out of the apartment and out in the brisk breeze of the windy winter's night five minutes later.

The church down the street set up a Christmas tree lot in its parking lot every year. George took Sydney there, her mind remembering more than she did. They weren't the only ones who had put off getting a tree until the last minute and found, among the few remaining options, a small blue spruce that wouldn't take up too much space or be too heavy to carry up three flights of stairs.

Their first trek up the stairs saw them successfully manage the Christmas tree. Their second found them with boxes of Christmas lights and decorations, the boxes perfectly labeled and pulled from the depths of the Burns family storage unit in the basement. George made a point of ignoring all the other perfectly labeled boxes until she found the right ones, all too aware of the well of emotion that hovered at the edge of her consciousness at the thought of what Christmas used to look like in this apartment, a Christmas she hadn't seen in years. Christmases she would never see again.

Sydney seemed to have a Ph.D. in stringing lights and George jokingly asked if that was something her mom taught her or something she had learned in the military. Sydney smiled at the joke but did not answer. As always, she was as tight-lipped about her family and her past as she was about almost everything else. George didn't mind. Sydney's quiet presence had proven itself invaluable after months on the road with temperamental artists and musicians. She was an island of calm for George in an otherwise chaotic career.

Christmas movie after Christmas movie played on the TV while they decorated the tree. They kept playing even after their dinner of Chinese food arrived. Long into the night, they played, Sydney and George camping out on the couch, each of them taking a side for themselves, their body clocks way off New York time and sleep far from both of their eyes.

The Christmas tree added a warm glow to an otherwise barren and cold apartment. George hated how Vivian had staged it. And now that it was her home, her base, she couldn't wait to make it up in her own style. She just needed time to do so. When that was going to be, she had no idea.

George's phone dinged, lighting up from the coffee table. Sydney grabbed it without a second thought as managing George's phone had become part of her job, a very important one, over the last six months. George's breath caught in her throat. She looked at the clock on the wall, not yet midnight. Maybe she had told Felix, maybe she had mentioned it offhand and he had remembered. Maybe it was him inviting her to spend Christmas Day with his family in New Jersey. George waited as Sydney's eyes scanned the message.

"Julien's flight is heading out. You won 'Rookie of the Year' at the Concept Christmas party."

All of George's hopes and dreams, impossible as they were, fell to the bottom of her stomach.

"Oh?" Was the best she could manage.

George couldn't care less about Concept's annual Christmas party. She had purposefully scheduled her flight from tour to take her to New York, not LA, just so she didn't have to go to said Christmas party. She really didn't care that they assigned awards and recognition certificates at the end of each year to boost the morale of their staff and artists. The text wasn't from Felix. She didn't care about anything.

"Julien says Happy Birthday and that he can't wait to see you." Sydney put down the phone. George could feel her eyes on her.

"It's your birthday?" She asked.

George nodded. She had almost forgotten herself.

"Happy birthday, kid."

Sydney said it with a surprising amount of affection in her tone. It was the first time she had let real emotion into her voice. It startled George so much to hear that she had to turn her head and look at her. The look on Sydney's face was actually readable and she looked almost... sad. George smiled to make her feel better. The smile helped George feel better.

"Thanks, Syd."

George had spent her birthday decorating for Christmas with Sydney. It wasn't the worst birthday she had ever had. George was simply grateful she got to spend the day with someone she considered a good friend, maybe even her best friend, George wasn't sure yet. All she knew was that she wanted Sydney to keep working with her, being with her, for as long as possible. That way George would never have to be alone.

A/N:

Okay, chapter three, how you feel?!

Who's our favorite character so far? I've got a serious soft spot for Sydney. I'm a big fan of stoic, quiet types who are incredible reliable and loving. Anyone else?

So here's what's going to happen:

I am going to post a new chapter every Sunday leading up to Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve, I will post the finally two chapters and that will be the end of Dec 24th!

The only question that remains is whether it will be the end of the George Briggs saga......

Well, I guess you'll just have to wait and see! I did say I have a whole lot of George content written so....

See you guys next Sunday! And the Sunday after that! And the Sunday after - you get the idea.