English Girls, Approximately.

I am greatful, exceedingly, for my first TWO lovely reviews and the praise. It's nice to leave for the day and come home to see a couple of hits, as well; I would like to sincerely thank everyone, as I've been nervous about reception of this. (And put in a special thanks to Mariam for pimping out my writing and giving me a shout-out. Thanks ever so. <3<3) Words can't describe. Thank you both for the kind reviews.

So! Here we are at the second chapter. I'm still nervous, mostly about my writing style and how I've handled the characters. Everything is still property of JKR; unfortunately I didn't wake up and become her over night. Please enjoy.


________

"All is quiet his tired eyes
see figures jotted down
and clothes all strewn around
the bedroom floor."

When the war had ended, when Terry had been shipped back to England with the rest of his battalion…

Most of the men out of the forces had girls waiting for them; wives or girlfriends at the least. They had left lives behind, waiting for them to take up with it again, pick up the parts and start again: not so with Terry.

He had moved back to the village with his parents, not knowing what else exactly to do. It seemed to be the right thing at the time; later, he came to regret it. The whole community knew that he had gone to war, knew that he had received a medal or two for wounds taken in battle. He was a revered war hero.
When he went out to eat, he was given the best seat in the house, the prime cut of meat. Old women stopped him in the street to inquire after his health, young boys were in awe of him. Everyone was always smiling and nodding at him, as if praising his job: well done!

Terry felt as though he were suffocating under such genial goodness. He always accepted the praise and adulation with good nature, but beneath it all he was burning with shame. He felt no great hero; he had no tales to tell. He had seen action but he had not enjoyed it; mates of his had gone down in battle and he had been there to see them fall. He hated to dredge to mind reminders of the fear that they had felt, crouched in dreary graveyards or hiding in musty houses, waiting for the Death Eaters. He hated to remember, and he did his best to forget.

All the girls that he had known from school, had dated once upon a time: they were all gone away, married and settled elsewhere. His old mates were still around, but they treated him oddly—they were good for a clap on the back and a pint on them, but they wanted war stories too. They wanted him to smile and grin and tell brave, ghastly tales of trapping Death Eaters and tormenting them.

Sometimes Terry felt as though he ought to tell them, fill the little old ladies he met in the lane about the time he had been forced to use an Unforgivable curse; the little boys would have their heads filled with Crutacious and Impendmenta, while the blokes at the bar would get a nice dose of the Avada Kerdavra experiences Terry had seen.

He was going bang out of his head, he knew that. He had to get away.

And so, five years after the last day of the war, Terry Boot packed his things, kissed his mum and dad goodbye, and sallied forth from his village.

How he had ended up, three days later, in the heart of Muggle London, he would never, ever know.

He had kept some vague destinations in mind—perhaps Cornwall, or maybe he’d pop down to France for a bit, take in the sights—but instead his feet had pointed him toward London. Great, big, massive, sprawling London: Terry hated the place. Large cities were not his cup of tea, especially not one so massive and smoky as London. The whole place smelled of soot and grime, and Terry could feel its oil on him the moment that he set foot into the sprawling monster of London.

He had no special skills, he had had no further training or schooling outside of graduating Hogwarts six or seven years ago—was it really that much? He was beginning to lose track—and he had no more gold in his pocket then what his parents had pressed upon him the morning of his departure. All his possessions were tied in a bulging rucksack on his back; Terry himself felt empty, and very much alone.

Might as well make a trip of it, he thought to himself.

It seemed ages ago that his parents had taken him to Diagon Alley, that they had bought his school things: books and quills and robes and everything else. Terry could remember trips to Gringotts, helping his father gather gold out of the family vault, stacking up the heavy coins in the little leather pouch; he had loved the way that the silver sparkled in the goblin’s torchlight.

Bank vault nearly empty, the Boot family made do with what they could. Terry was aware of the fact; he had resisted the gold coins his mother had forced on him simply because he knew that they numbered among their last. He had not said this, because even in their poverty his parents were a proud people, but he had felt completely wrong about taking the gold from them.

Diagon Alley was not the same that he had left it either—but then, it seemed nothing was. The memories from the past that Terry had were crowded together, blurs of color and light and motion. He supposed that he idolized what he had left behind, made it seem better then it was—but had the shops always been this run down? Had the wizards and witches on the street always looked so shabby?

Following the war, the ranks of wizards and witches returned home and took up with their old jobs, if they could. Some positions had already been given away to other job-needy people; everyone took what they could. Bank vaults were emptied to throw parties in celebration of returning family members, in elation at the death of Voldemort. But the joys were, all of then, short-lived as the harsh reality of life set in. The economy took a dive as people began to worry again—after all, if Voldemort had escaped death once, couldn’t he do it a second time?—as families scrounged for any money that they could find; businesses closed down, jobs were difficult to find, and life grew generally more and more difficult.
Terry had not held a job prior to the war. He had hardly gotten out of Hogwarts before the battles started; invigorated, he had thrown himself headfirst into the defense effort. Not an Aurorer, he had been inducted into the ranks of the Sators, the foot soldiers for the Cause. Dumbledore’s Cause. Everyone had called it that, now more then ever, even though it had had hardly anything to do with Dumbledore at all.

Terry wandered down Diagon Alley, taking everything in. Everywhere he looked was a memory from the past: to his right, Madam Malkin’s—and how he could remember his first robe fitting, getting pricked with pins every time he moved!—Ollivander’s way up ahead in the distance, the grimy windows nearly obscured by dirt—his trusty first wand from school, broken during a battle, but he had received a new one with honors—candy stores and bookstores and the Owl Emporium, it was all coming back to Terry in a rush.

The low-hanging roofs of the shops had a few tiles hanging loose; ivy crept up the sides of the cracked walls, and the cobblestones were rough and uneven. Still Terry could catch glimpses of the Diagon Alley that he had once known, before the war.

Since it was getting to be on the dinner hour and he had not kept the foresight to buy any food for the trip, Terry found a pub quickly and ducked into its dark interior.

He sat at the back and nursed a pint to himself, musing. He was depressed, here and now after the war; just as the shops had grown shabby, Terry had grown rusty too. He had spent so much time not thinking during the war, he had almost forgotten how.

He was depressed. Not because he missed the war—what idiot would miss that? The din of battle, the crackle of spells and the smell of singed flesh… He was glad it was over. He was not depressed because he wanted a girl, like all his mates seemed to have found—for men like Terry, prospects were not lacking. He was handsome in a ruffled, uncaring sort of way that made him all the more attractive. And it was not because his life lacked direction—really, when it came down to it, he did not care. He was sad because the war had not made him into what he had hoped it would—far worse, he realized, what so many similar fools had hoped it would make them. He supposed it had made him a man, whatever that meant—he could kill, he was a dead-on aim with an Unforgivable—but the killing had not given him the grim and pitiless eye of an artist. The rush of emotion—the mingled fear and excitement as you were set upon—shooting your spell of into the darkness, pretending to kill but rarely knowing if you had hit any mark or not—simultaneous embrace and fear of death—all of it he had left behind, hoping that it might instill in him some precious virtue he had not yet earned. He had hoped to return to England implanted with the passionate fervor of a survivor, taunt like a tightly-coiled spring. Fortunately he had shared this misconception with no one. Of all the virtues that his father preached, prudence was the highest praised. It kept people guessing, and, more often then not, admiring.

Terry sat in the pub and drank down his pint.

Evening faded into night; the ramshackle pub filled and emptied, over and over again, with guests of all sorts and brands. Terry watched them come and go with bleary eyes, grateful when the barkeep began filling his glass without even asking. She was a lovely young thing, he found himself thinking; then he chastised himself for thinking that way.

The year after the war had been one of great optimism—there was immense relief, drunken cheer, and a stanch sense of justification. But everyone that Terry had known had not been quick to voice grand expectations. This silence had grown, festered, until the world had become what it was: poor, shabby, grateful to be alive but worried still at some new threat. They had passed their old worries on for a new set. Terry had looked at the neighborhood girls and found their aspirations to be so false, so hollow and empty—but then again, so were his intentions of courting them.

He stayed long into the night, arguing in a gruff tone whatever anyone cared to argue with him. He was not drunk, he thought, but rather he wanted to be drunk, and he was overcompensating for this need. The beer kept flowing; no doubt he would be forced to pay up as closing time came. When it finally did arrive, Terry groggily found himself to be the last one at the bar.

The barkeep, the lovely young thing, was wiping the counter down with a rag. “Bung up, mate,” she called to him rather cheerfully across the empty pub. The tables were cleaned, their stools stacked on top; the floor shone half-heartedly in the low light of the candles. “We’re closing down for the night. Let’s have that tab.”

Grimly wondering just how much he had spent in drinks, Terry stood, fighting down the urge to be sick as his stomach rose with his body. “How much do I owe?” he asked, fishing in his pockets for the gold. There was woefully little of it left. He was going to have to find a job soon enough.

She drummed her fingers against the counter, clearly adding up the sum in her head. She really was quite lovely, he thought, watching her bite her bottom lip in thought—thin, with a thick mane of long red hair and huge brown eyes. Maybe a little too hollow; she could definitely use some filling out, but there was a beauty to her that was effortless.

“Let’s call it three Galleons and a Sickle, and we’ll be even,” she proclaimed, giving him that same smile. Her teeth were white in her lean face, a surprising compliment to her shabby beauty.

“You might as well bring me your glasses, too,” she added, as Terry stood and rubbed at his eyes, fishing in his pocket with one hand for his money pouch. “I’ll give ‘em a wash before I head off.”

He complied obediently, and she banged them into the sink with little ceremony, turning on her heel to collect his money in a slender white hand. There were little freckles all down her arm, Terry noted as he pressed the money to her; even the fine skin along her wrist and down to her hand was dotted with speckled browned spots.

“Thanks mate,” she said, flashing him that same grin as she tucked the money into her apron pouch.

The barkeep turned away, toward the mugs and the sink, but Terry leaned across the bar toward her, resting his elbows on the hard wood and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. He longed for a bit of night air to clear his head, but he wanted to make sure he was properly awake before he ventured out into the London night.

The girl glanced over at him. There was something irritatingly familiar about her. “Run into a ghost tonight?” she asked, quirking her mouth into a twist of a grin and cocking a delicate red eyebrow over her right eye. “You look a little washed out, a little bit peaky, though that might just be the pints you drank. And there were a lot of them,” she added, sloshing water over the glasses in the washbasin.

Terry snorted, rubbing at his jaw, which felt as though it had been struck repeatedly by a blunt object. “Nah,” he said. “No ghosts.”

“Rough day?” she corrected herself.

“You might say that.”

“You do look the type to be haunted,” she remarked. “If I do say so myself. I was climbing the back stairs of this place—” she nodded to the room in general, encompassing the whole of the pub, and it occurred to Terry that there rooms above their head, and he wondered what was in them. “—when I ran into it. Patch of cold air, but she didn’t even show herself. Drives the cat mad, she does.”

Her speech was jolly enough, disjointed from her actions as her hands worked the soapsuds around the slippery wet dishes; she did not even look over to him but concentrated wholly on her washing and keeping up her stream of conversation at the same time. “I’da steered cleara that bloke,” she proclaimed simply, swiping the rag back and forth across the glasses.

The ghost, she elaborated, was thought to be spirit of a susceptible girl, seduced by the enigmatic Alvers Whitby, an attractive wizard from an age ago who was said to have broken as many hearts as he had won. His rooms were still kept in hallowed perfection, every knick-knack untouched lest his restless spirit—and those of his many mistresses—be disturbed.

Terry was reminded forcibly of his grandmother’s house at this news, where every saucer and cobweb was left standing in a reminder of his dead grandfather, like an Egyptian tomb or a relic-filled old chapel.

“Well, miss,” he said in response to her story, smiling at her, “I wouldn’t want you spooked by any roving ghosts. Can I walk you home?”

She glanced sideways to him, imparting a bit of a funny look, then clicked her tongue against her teeth and tipped her head to one side. “If you don’t mind the wait,” she said. “Let me finish these up and I’ll nab my things.”

She did not let Terry help her with her coat, a stodgy brown affair that enveloped her slender shoulders and frame, but slung it easily onto her arms and went behind the bar. Checking her reflection in the bottles and glasses that were neatly stacked upon the shelves, waiting tomorrow’s use, she deftly reached into her pocket and, so neatly that Terry hardly saw her do it, swiped a lipstick across her lips. When she turned around again, her mouth was a bright, startling red.

She marched out of the pub in the lead, steps brisk and business-like, leaving Terry to trail in her wake; a whisk of her wand locked the door behind them. They set off down the narrow cobbled road of Diagon Alley together.

"I prefer this place at night,” she told him, smiling in the guttering streetlamp. “It’s less busy, less bustling with activity. You have space to breathe and think.”

Terry nodded, unsure of what to say beyond the friendly confines of the pub. Less busy was certainly one way to put it; Terry would have chosen dead. The street was deserted and soundless save for their clacking footsteps, the night snapping brisk and clear with the sky above painted in shades of deepest inky black without cloud in sight. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his overcoat to warm their frosty extremities, his breath exuding from his mouth in puffs of steam.

“Have I seen you from somewhere?” he asked, frankly and honestly a ways down the road.

She seemed content to walk along in silence, but at his question turned to him with eyebrows raised. “A very forward question,” she said. “I’m called Ginny.”

“A Weasley,” he said, smiling in memory. “Ah, yes.”

Her eyebrows rose even higher up her smooth white forehead. “Ah, yes?” she repeated.

“We were in school together,” Terry said quickly. “You, and I. You were a year behind me. In fact, we were in the D.A. together, I’m—”

“Terry Boot,” Ginny said, nodding as she glanced around their deserted surroundings. “I thought I recognized you from someplace or another. And it’s a pity there’s no one out tonight; it isn’t every day that a young lady gets walked along with Terry Boot. Excuse me, Terry Boot the decorated war hero, isn’t it? Terry Boot the eligible.” She pronounced the word with a heavy meaning, indicating that she was not in the running.

“It was in the papers,” she told him, at his perplexed look. “The day the Minister gave you your medals, I mean. And the reporters and the tabloids were all going mad over the fact that you were completely unattached. You didn’t read the
articles?” She sounded surprised as he continued to gaze at her, confused.

“No,” Terry confessed. “My mother gave them to me, but I just, sort of, put them away.”

Ginny laughed at that, a delightful sound that echoed down the empty street and gave a shake to her marvelous head of red hair. “Ah, yes,” she mocked, but with such a quirk to her lipsticked mouth that he had to laugh along with her.

They walked together down the dark street, Terry with his hands jammed into his coat pockets, Ginny with hers tucked neatly beneath her arms; they talked candidly and easily the whole trip down the lane, and Terry found himself actually enjoying the discussion, though he credited part of that to the rather high number of pints he had consumed not an hour previous.

They came to talk about war brides; Ginny earnestly told him all about a girl she had known nearly all her life, who had married a boy right off of the front and had moved to a place called Quaannag in snowy ironic Greenland. The girl had since owled Ginny to say what a shock it had been to arrive there. “And what a name, really, I mean, it sounds like you’re trying cough up your entire respiratory system; with a mangled croak of a place like that, what do did she expect? As far as the eye can see, tundra, she says. She just can’t over how white the place is—nothing but snow and ice, like a bloody ocean, and it’s all stark and pale as a sheet. Even the animals. White rabbits, white owls, white foxes—like it’s all scared bloodless, the whole place.”

Terry watched her extinguish her cigarette against the sole of her shoe, stopping and lifting her foot and grinding the butt against the rubber before tucking the end into the cuff of her jacket.

“I would never want a military man,” she said, letting her breath hiss out from her nose in a delicate cloud into the night air. “Not one that was all jumped up for himself anyway. Too noble, too forthright, too earnest. I like a man with fault.”

“A harsh opinion,” Terry noted.

Ginny snorted. “I’m allowed. My mum thought me an old maid. Can you imagine? Twenty-one and I’m already past my prime. But then, she married my dad right out of Hogwarts, so. She always said I’d never marry. Too set in my ways, that old dirge.” She laughed again, a summery sound in the severity of the dark.

“And what would you do with this freedom that you so desire?” Terry was twenty-two. He would probably marry one of two village girls whose families were old acquaintances with his own. They were bright, fresh, clean and suspiciously compliant.

She accepted a second cigarette from him, lighting it with her wand and letting the smoke slide out from between her red lips. Terry could see a faint pattern of her lipstick on the white end of her cigarette when she drew it away. “I don’t know. I enjoy the life I’m living, I suppose. Wiping down the pub, cleaning the glasses, serving drinks and being the life of the party—it’s second nature, you might say. It’s not an easy time but it serves me well enough. But there’s some parts of you that are after a brood of children—rambunctious little boys; they say girls turn against their mothers quicker—and a big old rambling house out in the country. Your eyes are starved for green in hard stone London, you know?”

Ginny pulled up short at that. Terry glanced over at her.

“A brood of children,” he repeated, to fill the silence.

Ginny laughed, broad and full; there was a quiet behind her voice when she next spoke. “Listen to my nonsense,” she said. “Rambling on about ghosts and war wives and then all this nonsense. It’s the coal in the air, or the smokes—gone straight to my head. It’s just here,” and she nodded to the ramshackle old building that they were drawing up to, its crown disappearing into a haze of distant, skyward mist and cloud. “Commit me, I suppose. Maybe I’m going over the bend.”

Ginny smiled again and gave a light squeeze to his arm; unlocking her front door she gave one last puff to her cigarette before dropping it in the gutter and giving him that genial smile over her slender shoulder.

She was gone behind the frosted glass of her front door before Terry knew it; he was standing alone on the darkened street with his hands in his pockets without any real place to stay. Ginny’s cigarette butt gleamed dully in the half-light from the streetlamps, fading red to orange and then fizzling out altogether in a stream of grayish smoke that joined the mist gartering the night.