English Girls, Approximately.

Here we are again. Thanks to anyone who is still following this and reading it.

I'm less certain of this chapter; I was trying some new bits out and I don't know if they came out as I intended, so this is subject to change. Any thoughts on this or any of the rest is greatly appreciated. Please enjoy, and remember: it all belongs to JKR. Thanks!


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"Now nothing's adding up
and nothing's making sense."


Once upon what seems like a very long time ago, Terry Boot had considered himself somewhat of a writer.

Everyone in Ravenclaw House had their intellectual pursuits—their potion experimentations, their spell-writing, their complicated ponderings of the intricacies enmeshed in the tongues of Troll, Meremish, the mating habits of unicorns and bycorns, the spores of hellebore and the roots of the mandrake. Terry had always felt a bit left behind, crammed into the corner of the Common Room, scribbling across sheaves of parchment with a quill that he sometimes caught himself sucking on in thought.

He was never any good, he has to admit that to himself. Back then, it seemed enough just to write—to spin everything out across the crackling parchment without much of an otherwise thought. Barker, Yeates, and that little third year Gwennie Owens who was always tagging after them—all of them people Terry knew but didn't really know; they used to come and grumble at him over that: “What’re you writing, Ter?”

“Not much.” He’d scramble to scatter papers over his handwriting every time; Barker, wiry Liam Barker, always managed to catch hold of at least one, holding it up to the firelight flickering in the grate, and would read aloud grandly, “Shadows chasing their way across the floor… Let’s see here, something about dark glimmering eyes…a sheaf of shimmering hair—why, Ter,” and he would drop his arms as though coming to some grand realization, “I do believe you’re writing about little Gwennie! You aren’t in love with her, man? Are you?”

Gwennie Owens would giggle on cue. “Oh, Liam,” she’d gush, slapping his arm with light immaturity, “you’re such an awful tease. Leave Terry alone and come along. He likes to write—he holes himself up here on purpose, you know that,” and she’d smile at Terry over her shoulder as though she were doing him some sort of favor, and Terry would try and smile back. He wasn’t in love with her at all; he couldn’t stand little Gwennie Owens the third year, with a snubby nose and hair that she hung in fat pigtails like curtain tassels, and dark eyes that didn’t so much glimmer as they did glisten wetly in her too-eager lapdog face.

Usually they’d clatter along their way right after that, crossing the Common Room with their usual manner, maybe stopping for Gwennie Owens to snap up Padma Patil and haul her off in the wake of the boys in a cloud of girlish giggles, and Terry would sift through his pages again, pick up the one that Barker had dropped, maybe start writing again or maybe throw it into the maw of the fire, too disenchanted with it to continue.

Gwennie Owens, Liam Barker, and Sumner Yeates—Terry hadn’t thought of them in a long time. He hasn’t thought about anything in a long time, but something about that evening in the bar, drinking until closing, walking Ginny Weasley home: something had set him thinking again.

And maybe he’d like to write again. He could set up shop somewhere, put quill to page again, set down everything that had been cropping into his head all these years. He hasn’t written a word since the War, since after Hogwarts. He hasn’t had time to think much. Things needed to happen; decisions needed to be made.

“What do you want to do, dear?” his mother had asked him, on the Christmas holiday of his fifth year. It hadn’t exactly been the merriest of Christmases—his father had gotten sacked exactly one month and a day before the twenty-fifth of December and hadn’t been able to find work again. The plastic tree—filling the whole house with the faint smell of lemon—was leaning in the corner, tinsel draped miserably over its synthetic branches.

“What?” Terry had been midway into a bite of treacle tart, and met her eyes over the chasm of the dinner table.

“What do you want to do, with your life?” she pressed, setting her fork down and leaning toward him. “Have you given it any thought? I know they’ll start asking soon—it’s little Professor Flitwick for Ravenclaw still? Goodness, he was a dear, I always loved him—”

“Libby,” Terry’s father said, setting his fork down too with a sigh, pressing his fingers to his temples and closing his eyes, “please, let the boy alone.”

“Terry,” his mother said, reaching over and giving his hand a squeeze, “what do you want to do?”

“Not over dinner,” his father groaned.

“Dunno,” Terry had answered, toying with his treacle. It was slightly rubbery and not all that good, but his mother had made it just for him, so he felt obligated to at least pretend. “Haven’t thought of it much.”

“Surely you’ve thought of something?” She squeezed his hand again, so well-meaning.

“Dunno,” Terry had said again. His head had been full of other things—the D.A., Quidditch matches, Umbridge, schoolwork, Padma Patil almost smiling at him, the letter he was writing to pretty Bianca Vioget from Beauxbatons, who he’d taken to the Yule Ball last year and kissed on the stairs. Everything but jobs, working, life after Hogwarts; everything but the future and what came next. “Maybe something with writing?”

His parents had exchanged Looks across the table; his father sighed again. “Son, I don’t know about that.”

“Harold, don’t be ridiculous,” his mother laughed, waving a hand gaily as though to shoo aside the very idea. “We have to encourage him. Go on, lamb. I didn’t know you enjoyed to write! So—something with writing? Something like—well, what?”

Terry hadn’t known what to say to that. His mouth seemed to dry up, his stomach failed him and his throat caved in. “Maybe—” Not the Prophet. Not novels. Not for magazines.

“The Prophet?” suggested his mother.

“No,” he mumbled, poking at the chewy treacle with his fork. The silverware was all mismatched and spotted with age; Terry’s mother had bought it secondhand a few years back, and spent every afternoon polishing it as though she could scour away the silverstains. “I mean—it was a stupid idea. Maybe a—a Auror, or something.”

Irony had made him a Sator. Or maybe it was just Fate—Terry thought that they were one and the same anyway. He didn’t hold much with religion, or even luck in particular—if there was a God, then He hated Terry Boot; if there was luck, then Terry had the worst of it.

Front lines, tucking your wand carefully away—big thick boots with heavy soles, high-collared trench coats that weighed your arms down and made you feel like you were being dragged down into the mud with the fallen dead—wading through corpses of people you knew and people you’d never seen before, their faces caricature paroxysms of fear, of pain, of grief and terror; sloshing through fog as thick as his mother’s treacle from that December night, heading toward who-knew-what, faces drawn grim with the own special fear of foot soldiers. It always seemed to be night in those days, always edged in fog and rain and a cloud layer so thick it hurt to breathe. If that was smoke or smog or ash, Terry never knew. He never wanted to know.

And he never wanted to think about it, never wanted to dream about it, never wanted see the drizzling rain of the plains every time he looked out his London windows, rain splashing down into a gutter that became a mouth, a twisted maw, a man trembling in the mud, his hands knotted into spasms like gnarled tree roots; his name was Benjy or Ted or something ridiculous like that—or maybe it was Yeates, Barker, little Gwennie Owens, curled up and shaking in the rain. A mist, a cold mist chilling down to bones, twisting your face into fear—Dementors, somewhere close; you’d seize your wand, wrap your fingers around it, trying to think happy thoughts, trying to remember warm fires and your mum’s treacle tart, one that didn’t feel like tires between your teeth, when all you could taste was stale fear, cold air, mud and blood and bile—

Terry never wanted to think about it again, but he dreamed about it every night; he woke up curled at the foot of the beds in the halfway houses between home and London; he saw raindrops, wizards gathered beneath umbrellas, muttering to each other and he could see blood, tears, mud, fear everywhere.

So he wasn’t surprised when he went into Flourish and Blott’s; wasn’t surprised when he came out with a thick sheaf of parchment and a new quill to chew on, and sat down on the side of the curb and started to scribble:

Blood and tears and mud, and fear everywhere; everything changes around… Trembling sheets of darkness, tremmored hands clutching wand too thin to stand between, faces blanched with fear, with death warmed over all over again, every night and day—

“You need a life, Terry Boot,” he told himself thickly, throwing the quill away into the gutter. He had been biting his lip; blood dripped down his chin and made a little spot like a watermark on the page.