English Girls, Approximately.

Thanks again for my two reviews and all the hits I've gotten thus far. I've been updating like mad, or so it seems. Really it's just nice to get into the swing of writing something that I can draw out. It seems somehow more official to see it on a site somewhere rather than just in a Word document. And anyway, I'm finding myself more and more attatched to these characters and the plot threads that I'm dutifully spinning. I can only hope that you've not grown tired of my often rambling writing style, and that I'm not feeling too good about this or giving myself too much credit. (And, speaking of credit, let's give it where it's due: JKR still owns everything that I'm playing with.)

I have to say, one of the more difficult bits of writing is finding good stopping places, as well as thinking up chapter titles. I believe I'm rather weak in that latter department, and I always fumble and struggle to think up halfway decent titles. So far it's been hit and miss with only the two I've got, and now a third!

In addition to all of this, I have to admit that things are happening rather slowly in the story. This is exactly the pace I want; I like to set up plot and characters before I delve into new relationships, but trust me: things will move, I promise. I just have to lead in to it. So please stay with me, and give this all a chance.

Please enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks to everyone!


________

"Ain't got a mother or father or place to fall
She got a brother in the blues, but he doesn't know the blues at all."

Ginny’s father died on a Tuesday evening and the phone rang Wednesday morning.

It did so, conveniently, just as Ginny was jamming bread into the toaster, a curious Muggle contraption she had picked up at a sale a few weeks back. She was still mastering the schematics of it, seemingly missing the inborn Weasley trait of charming Muggle objects; her toast was smoking when the ring jangled across the cluttered little kitchenette.

The only reason she had a telephone at all was at her father’s insistence. It had been a Christmas present a few years back and Ginny, less then enchanted with the plastic eyesore, had dutifully put it in her little parlor. She did not understand the need for it, since her father could communicate with her any number of other ways, but he had loved nothing more then to ring her up on the weekends for the sheer novelty of it.

She managed to scoop it up on the third ring. “Hallo dad.”

“Ginny?” The voice on the other end was not her father’s, but rather the tinny, crackled sound of her brother Bill’s voice. “It’s Bill.”

“Bill,” she said, correcting herself and a bit confused. “Since when do you use a telephone?”

“You’re not connected to the Floo network right now,” he said, sounding vaguely reproving.

“Oh, yes; I had that shut off last month.’

“You did?”

“Couldn’t pay for it.” Ginny lifted the phone’s cord over her kitchen chair, scowling at its limited reach as she tugged at it, trying to reach her smoldering toaster.

“I would have lent you a sum for it.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you,” she countered. “Don’t need it. And obviously anyone important enough can contact me without it, since you rang me up on this damn thing.”

“It was a last resort. Charlie suggested it, actually.”

“Charlie always was the sensible one.”

“If you’re going to be catty, I can hand the phone over to him.”

Ginny softened at the hurt, however mock, in her eldest brother’s voice. “All right, all right,” she relented. “I’m sorry. This damn toaster-thing is burning the hell out of my breakfast and it’s got me in a mood. What’s up?”

Bill was the one with tact; Bill had always been the one with tact. Everyone else might lay things right on you, but Bill would talk you into things, would prod and coax and whatever else he had to do to bring you round.

“I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he answered her bluntly.

Why she didn’t think of their father, Ginny later couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the tone of Bill’s voice—he did not sound sad enough for someone with news of a death. She thought instead for a moment of the Burrow, that it had burnt to the ground; maybe one of the twins had been on the bad end of a firework again. Briefly she wondered why Charlie was there with Bill; they worked opposite ends of the country and were hardly together but for holidays. She waited.

“It’s dad. He’s died. He’s dead.”

“Dad?” Ginny repeated in her brother’s expectant silence. The toast didn’t matter any more. It was singeing her ceiling black with smoke but she found that she didn’t care. She looked out the window, at the grimy streets of Diagon Alley, where a young witch was crossing the street straight in her direction. “Dad? Dead?” she said again, numbly. “Dad?”

“Yes,” Bill pressed on, “I had a call from Charlie early this morning, who heard it from one of the neighbors. He seems to have had some sort of complication or something and he was alone at the house. Anyway, I was wondering how soon you could make it down here.”

For the first time, Ginny heard the real sorrow underlying her brother’s voice. “Yes, I,” she said, and wondered with an ironic laugh in her head what you were supposed to say upon such news. “Yes. I mean, I can make it down as soon as possible. I just better nip on over to the Glove and let them know there that I won’t be in for a few days.”

“Few days ought to be fine. We’ll want to have a proper funeral and all, of course. Dad was influential and all, you know.”

It didn’t need to be said. Ginny hoisted herself onto the counter and idly unplugged the toaster. “Yes,” she said again. “Yes, I’ll—I’ll be there.”

“Great.” Bill sounded relieved. Ginny, the meandering Weasley, was probably thought to drag her heels and resist; she smiled wryly against the receiver. She was not exactly the most compliant of the family and had rather earned herself the reputation as a sort of stubborn black sheep. Funny how things worked out that way, she mused idly, watching the witch avoid a puddle gathered in the gutter. If you would have asked her, or anyone—they would have said Fred, George, one of them was the black sheep, and now it had ended up being her. Simply because.

“I’ll see you soon, then.”

“Yeah. Yes. Yes, you will. As soon as I can make it.”

“Don’t rush yourself.” Bill laughed, easily. “We’ve got it under control. Charlie’s the grunt work right now, and Hermione’s got everything moderated beneath her careful eye.”

The obligatory “great” that Ginny had been about to utter froze on her mouth, at the tip of her tongue. “That’s,” she managed. “That’s nice.”

“See you soon. Bye. Love you.” Bill always said these last two words quickly, as though worried that someone walking by might hear him. “See you.”

“See you,” Ginny finally managed, but he had hung up and she was talking to the dial tone. He hadn’t waited to hear.

She crossed the room slowly and let the phone drop back into the cradle before turning back to the window, leaning her elbows across the sill and letting her chin come to rest in the cradle of folded arms.

She was shaken up by the sudden news, but they had assumed that her father would follow mum into death not too long after. It had been so odd to see him apart from her: the missing piece obvious against his lonely standing self. They had balanced each other, supported each other. Ginny halfway wondered if she was like that to people who watched her—operating with missing pieces.

But it had never been as far as all of that. We were never really a part of each other. And yet, they had been, in their own way, in his way, and now—

Charlie’s acting as grunt work right now, and Hermione’s got everything moderated beneath her careful eye. Ginny ran over the words again in her head, playing them back over like a recording. How easy it was to forget, or to pretend to forget. How hard again, to remember.

She got up and pried the bread out of the toaster. It was black and crusted with burns; she tossed it in the rubbish bin and went to find some clean robes that did not look too frayed.


The moment she stepped into the door, Ginny was crushed in an embrace by Charlie.

Charlie, her elder brother, taller then her of course—but then, all her brothers were, in an immediately noticeable way that made Ginny feel so childlike compared to them. The feeling of the embrace is instantly parental, not exactly in a bad way, and Ginny is first to pull away. “Ginny, Ginny, I never thought it could happen, I thought he’d live to ninety, I thought he would watch me walk little Laurie down the aisle.”

Sometimes Ginny thinks Charlie should have been an actor or a radio announcer, but always corrects herself since Charlie wouldn’t recognize artifice if it were a Beater’s club smashing him in the jaw. All the mean-spiritedness of the dragons he dealt with seemed to bounce off of him; he was cheerful, smiling to the last with a gung-ho attitude that daunted the most resistant of beasts. He was that rare cliché, the diamond chiseled well beyond the rough.

If she were asked to list her own attributes, sweetness would be rather low on the list. Perhaps patience would be on top; the twins always had ambition and charm to spare, and Bill had his looks. It had served them all well, she supposed in the long run.

Charlie was clad in rough-spun robes that were not so much badly made as they were well-worn, a signature of his trade. Ginny looked down to find his boots caked in mud even now, an extension of the spots of the stuff that spattered the front of his robes.

Charlie bit his lip and gave her an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry,” he said, mopping at her smudged shoulder with his sleeve, “I was just in the back tidying up and Bill told me that you were arriving, I’m moving tables and setting up the chairs; Sarah’s in the kitchen, making up leg of lamb—I thought, you know, dad always liked lamb’s leg with potatoes, so we could have that—”

“Charlie, we can’t do leg of lamb for two hundred guests.” Bill comes down the hallway now, wiping his hands off on a towel that he carries at his side. The faint line that creases his forehead, straight between his eyes, reminds Ginny of when her father used to get that same expression on his face. Bill rubs the bridge of his nose, something that he’s done since before Ginny can remember. “It won’t feed them all, you’re out of your mind. I thought we’d agreed on chicken something-or-other.”

“Not for all of them—not for the funeral—just for us, Bill, just for the family.” Charlie steps aside and lets Bill hug Ginny; she closes her arms around her eldest brother in an uncontrollable reflex, pressed gently against him. “I thought, you know, dad would like it. Might like it.”

Bill quirks a smile at that, and Ginny grins back, lifting her eyebrows. “Good to see you,” he tells her.

“Good to see you, too,” she answers sincerely. And it is—she’s not denying that, although she can already feel just how suffocating living here had become. On one hand, she has missed it. On the other…

She smiles up at Bill, shaking the thoughts from her head.

“Well, unfortunately you just caught me on my way out again,” Charlie says, clapping his hands together and grinning at her, drawing Ginny’s attention away. “I have to go finish up with those tables, Bill can get you all settled in—you’ll see, you’re going to hate him, lord of the manor already,” and Charlie grins at them both, impish and sweet, before ducking out the front door and closing it behind him.

The front hall of the Burrow is dark; Ginny can hear mum’s old clock ticking away somewhere. She half-wonders what its hands will read now.

“Well,” she says.

Bill gives her an awkward smile. “Yeah,” he replies. “And what else can you say?”

Ginny sets her bags down on the worn carpet next to her, glancing around the room. To her right she can see the parlor, the old familiar fireplace and low couches with the bottoms half falling out. The room curves away into the sunlit kitchen—she can see the beams of light falling through the windows, illumining the old red-brick floor, can hear the sounds of pots and pans and the clatter of cutlery that indicates Charlie’s wife Sarah is already hard at work on that leg of lamb. If Ginny pretends, she can almost imagine that it’s her mum in the kitchen, banging dishes into the washbasin and humming tunelessly along with the radio—except when Sarah hums, there’s a tune to it, and Sarah never bangs the dishes for fear of putting chips in their paint.

“You’re in your old room, of course,” Bill says, taking her by the arm and grabbing her case in his other hand, hefting its weight easily across his back. “Fleur and I are in mine, and—well, actually, everything’s as it should be, and the wee ones are with their parents. Speaking of,” and he leads Ginny toward the spindled staircase, calling up the way, “Mes petits poires! Il est lá! Aunt est arrivè!”

Ginny stumbles up a step behind him, and it occurs to her how very much she wants a cigarette right now. “Bill, we can take this stuff up there later,” she protests.

“Attends! Nous sommes occupèe!” Fleur calls back from somewhere above.

“I’m actually quite famished, and whatever Sarah is making smells good,” Ginny lies.

“Oh, right,” and Bill sets her case right down on the steps, turning around and leading the way back down. “Well, you’re probably smelling Charlie’s leg of lamb, and you can’t have any of that—it’s under strict watch, don’t you know. But surely there’s something for you in the pantry…”

“I’ll find it all right,” she assures him, patting him on the shoulder. “You go on up to Fleur and help her out with the girls.”

“You sure?” Fleur makes Bill get his hair cut now. Ginny misses the long thick ponytail that used to hang down Bill’s back; she had liked flicking at it with her fingertips to irritate him. It’s short now, or shorter, a fringe of lengthy rumpled locks that frame his face in red gold just beginning to darken to russet. Life in France has not dulled the bronze of his skin, nor dimmed the freckles on his nose—is he taller, though? He is not as wiry as he used to be; there is some hint of a father about his person. Ginny can see it, in the sag of his shoulders and the spots on his shirt. In that instant, she sees her own father, and shivers in the warm front hall.

“I’m sure,” she assures him, quickly bringing a smile to her face. “I haven’t yet forgotten where the kitchen is, don’t worry.”

Bill gives her another grin and bumps up against her in another quick embrace. “It’s good to have you home,” he says into the top of her head. “Hell, it’s good to have everyone home—back here, where they belong.”

Ginny does not reply, but slips her bags into the hall closet and makes her way to the kitchen.