English Girls, Approximately.

I'm greatful as always for the hits and reviews that I've gotten. I was especially proud of my last chapter, I don't mind saying (and don't consider it to be boasting, at least not too much, anyway).

Cristie, I'm glad that you mentioned what you did in your review; it's nice to hear honest opinions. I'm always afraid that my writing drags too much, or that details gets my points bogged down, but this time I'm afraid that I would have to argue with you. While I agree that it's slow going, I'd like to state that the start is this slow because I intended it to be. I didn't want to make this a one-shot or PWP (not that I think this is what you were getting at) because I'm fond of storytelling and writing beyond fanfiction. I'm attempting to develop this story as I would develop anything else, working out characters and relationships before I get into anything too quickly. I realize that billing this as a Ginny/Terry story might seem like a bit of, um, false advertising, to say the least, but trust me that fairly quickly they will come into contact. I considered this a bit before setting out, but it seemed important to me that I develop them beyond their relationship together. I don't intend for this to be ending anytime soon; I write lengthy pieces and I don't see where this will be an exception. It will get brighter, I promise!--I know it seems to be depression after depression (and this chapter will be no exception, I'm sorry to say) but it's all leading us somewhere, into a brighter future. I can't imagine that after the War, things would seem very bright. I hate to think of your interest dragging, or getting lost in depressing details, but it will be taking different turns, I promise you. I hope you and anyone else in your vein of thought can hold on long enough.

I would also like to thank Anon for his kind, supportive comments. You've captured a lot of my thoughts and intentions in your verbose reply--thanks for that. It's very high praise to salute me as a fine amature writer in any sense of the word, never mind the finest that you've seen; I'm very touched that you'd think of my writing in that manner. I am eventually intending to write when I get older (not to brag) and I'm honored that you'd think that way about my writing already; I think that I have a lot still to learn but it's nice of you--and other reviewers too of course--to give such positive, advanced feedback. Thank you very much for all your comments and your review.

Now, on to the actual chapter. This is a bit shorter than the last one...


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I'm missing the war
I'm missing the war all night
Missing the war.




It was still raining when Terry woke up that morning, and it was raining when he went back to bed. Which, coincidently, was about five minutes after he woke up.

Perhaps he had missed something; maybe there had been a warning label on London before he arrived in the dreary city. Every day he could remember in Diagon Alley, every halcolyn golden day, had been briskly September without fail, with leaves and chill winds but without raindrops. And every day that he woke up in his leaky attic room, with the floorboards gone gray from dust and disuse, every time he crossed the room to the grimy window shoved in one corner, all he saw was rain.

It was beginning to get a bit depressing. Or would be, if Terry wasn’t already feeling quite depressed all on his own. The rain didn’t help anything.

Terry didn’t go out all day, but lay in bed staring at the moldy old hangings, listening to the rain tapping on the windowpane and watching the gray sunlight creep its way around the room with silent footsteps.

“I might die,” he announced to the room around lunchtime.

Around teatime, he had decided that his previous statement was far too dramatic and really had no grounds in reality, so he coughed into his hand a moment before saying, “Yes, all right; I take it back. Wasn’t spot on. I am not going to die, I might just lie here for the rest of my life.” Which, admittedly, sounded quite appealing.

“Christ,” Terry said, about ten minutes after teatime. “I’m laying in bed making announcements and recessions to an empty room in the world’s most depressing city. I’m really going round the bend.”

And, “Loony,” he told himself at dinnertime. “Fucking loony.”

The next time he spoke, it was morning already. His mouth tasted like cotton and his brain felt stuffed with feathers; his fingers were wrapped tight around the blankets, pulling them taut against his chin. He had always had a fear of vampires sneaking in his room, sliding in beneath the crack where door met floor and gliding to his bed to suck his blood. Blankets around his neck were an odd sort of comfort, even now years after he should have been scared of something as childish as vampires getting in his room.

After all, he knew better. He knew vampires. Vampires weren’t skinny enough to fit between the floor and the door, and anyway they wouldn’t lower themselves to crawl around the dirty floor—they were as prissy as Purebloods. They’d simply break the door down, rip the blanket to shreds, tear his throat open and lap up the blood like kittens as it dripped and pooled on the floor and ran red over the blankets, dripped down like more raindrops.

“Get up, Terry,” he ordered himself that morning, and so now he hauls himself to his feet and shuffles back over to the window, leaning his forehead against the cold glass.

Rain still thuds against the glass, shuddering against his skin. Pale sunlight tries to split the clouds, dancing across the pale pavement for a heartbeat before fading away again, retreating back, scurrying backward between the cracks of the pavement.

Over his shoulder, if he were to raise his head and look, he would see the wobbly little writing desk, stacked with empty sheaves of parchment and the chewed on muddy quill laying across the top, like a dodgy bow on a stack of crumpled Christmas presents. Terry has tucked one sheet of paper into the otherwise empty drawers of the dusty armoire across the room; one sheet, scribbled across with ramblings he hardly remembers setting to parchment in the street:

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

and no period at the end, just left hanging there, the edge of some undefined cliff, waiting for him to set one toe out of line, one foot over its precarious rim. What the edge belongs to, what’s on the other side of the cliff, Terry can’t say. He can’t even say what made a cliff spring to mind, or why he’s left all that paper sitting there in a great stack, just waiting to be used.

His fingers jump against the windowsill, drumming on their own accord against the rotty wood. “Itchy fingers,” he announces to the room at large, and isn’t even really certain of what made him say that.

Terry paces back across the room again, hands shoved deep in his pockets. The rumpled mess of his bed is looking distinctly inviting, and really if he’s entirely honesty, there’s nothing more that he wants to do than crawl back between the blankets, pull his pillows over his head, and fall back into the glassy daze that he’s been inhabiting for the past day.

He’s standing over the blank parchments now, looking down at them, and in a strange way Terry could swear that they’re looking back up at in, staring with vacant eyes traced out in the flaws of the paper, the little flecks and darker lines making faces at him. Or maybe he’s imagining that; maybe he hasn’t slept enough; maybe he’s still asleep between the blankets with his pillows over his head, falling in and out of sleeping.

Terry pulls out the desk chair and separates a new sheet from the rest, jamming the muddy quill back between his teeth. He can taste the gunk of the gutter, and for a split second realizes that he might as well go out into the street and lick the sidewalk, that he’s putting God-knows-what between his teeth; but the quill smells like rain, and the next thing Terry knows he’s writing, words are splitting out of his fingers and dripping across the page in long runs of sentences. He’s scratching away, writing word after word in fits of literary movements, and he only stops writing when the room grows dark, when it’s gotten too late to see without finding a candle to light. Terry pushes back away from the desk, tossing the quill down, spattering a drop or two of ink across the full page.

Now it’s staring back at him, even with the little vacant flaw eyes all covered in raw moist scrapes of ink made into letters made into words that gleam with all the newness of wet ink. It’s staring back at him, and Terry rummages in his trunk—that banged up old thing, the one he lugged around with him what seems to be ages ago, on and off the train—for a candle, lights it with fumbling fingers so he can read what he’s written. And when he’s done, he reads it again in the flickering light of the candle, until it swims in front of his eyes and he has to push it away.

Manning still had his wand. They always put us together, I don’t know why. Before I had anything to think about, before there was anything really to worry about, I used to wonder what it was that made them chose partners. Manning and I laughed about being partners, it was like when we were small and in primary school, where they’d pair you up to make sure you didn’t get lost. Don’t get lost, we’d tease each other, and even when they captured us we didn’t get lost. We stayed together.

So Manning had his wand, still had his wand. I don’t know how he kept it. Under his jacket, tucked up in the sleeve, somewhere; he had to keep the thing somewhere but it just appeared out of the air. It was dark, polished wood of some kind, and when he yanked it out, it gleamed in the sunlight, just for a second. It was when they were forcing us toward the doors, just before we stepped inside—he was in front of me, there wasn’t anything I could do, anywhere I could go. And suddenly he was pulling out his wand, like it was going to save us. Like that tiny wand—that piece of fucking wood, nothing else—like it was going to make a difference. He had to know what they would do, what they could do just because they felt like it, what the world does to a man like him, he had to know all of it. Jesus, I wanted to burst out laughing, except it would have hurt. That stupid fucking absurd piece of wood, like the Death Eaters were all going to just—just drop their wands and run away—Christ.

Manning forgot that Death Eaters knew what they were doing, know what they’re doing. They’re Death Eaters because they’re good at what they do. They know how to take hostages, they know how to kill people, they know how to shut you up. I think he might have got to shout out something about being armed, but that same instant they blasted the wand right out of his hand, along with most of his fingers. There were two whole ones lying in the dirt, little pink sausage fingers; blood was streaming down Manning’s empty hand in red ribbons. I think I could hear it, running red down into the mud. A shard of bone had grazed along under my eye, and a little lick of blood was trickling down my cheek, but I didn’t raise my hand to brush it away. They wrapped Manning’s hand in his own shirt, ripped up what was left to make us blindfolds. No one spoke a word; when they slid the blindfold over my eyes, I could see a little red spot silhouetted against the dark, a fleck of blood. The only sound was Manning weeping. Or maybe there was something else, maybe they did say something. I wasn’t paying much attention, I was counting all my fingers. And toes, just to be sure. It was stupid, it was stupid even in my head back then, but all I could think was how quickly it had happened, how there had been a wand and there had been fingers; and then there were fingers laying in the dirt with splinters all around them, splinters from that wand that they blasted out of Manning’s hand, and I kept running the scene over and over again, waiting to see when the impact hit, to hear a noise, a pop, something. There wasn’t anything. They’d blasted his fingers away, split five numbs of bone and muscle and flesh into a thousand pieces of soft rubble that littered the ground and cut into my cheek.

I almost started to laugh again, almost forgot how much that would hurt. I guess there’d be a word for that feeling, where you don’t even really care about how much laughing would hurt, when it seems right to laugh with a scrap of your partner’s shirt tied around your face and a bit of his finger bone stuck in your cheek. I guess it would be stress, or maybe temporary insanity, except that would be two words. But two words make it work better than just the one: temporary insanity. When they’re hustling you inside some low building in the middle of no where at the end of a battle, with your partner’s shirt tied around your face and a bit of his finger shoved into your cheek, with him sobbing around some gag they must have stuffed in his mouth but you wouldn’t know, you can’t see a thing; and all you want to do is laugh. Just throw yourself on the floor and burst out laughing, roll around and forget cracked ribs beaten flat, forget weeping Manning and the finger stuck in your face, just laugh at the absurdity of it all. Because this wasn’t what you signed up for. Because you were in this for something else. Because you never thought that you’d end up here, like this, of all Goddamn things. And you can’t figure out why they haven’t killed you yet except they must have a reason. And you don’t want to know what that reason is, and there’s a little more hot blood dripping down from the tiny scar of Manning’s finger bone in the side of your face, and you can’t even see where they’ve taking you. And all the while there’s laughter bubbling up hot in your stomach, and you think you’re going to be sick.

Terry watches candle wax drip down onto the desk, pool in a white puddle around the base. Something stupid inside him wants to touch the candle, dip his fingers into the hot wax; instead, he raises his hand to his face, touches his fingertips to his left cheek, where the faintest trace of a puckered scar sketches over a raised lump of hard bone—hard bone that doesn’t belong to him, hard bone that doesn’t belong in the side of his face, hard bone that had stuck its way under his skin and wedged itself in and barely raised the skin, but a lump of hard bone that Terry always knew was there.

He blew out the candle and crawled back between the blankets, and dreamed through what was left of the night: of red blood and red hair, fingers laying in the dirt, fingers crawling up his ankle, a quill stuck between his teeth and a finger bone knotted in his hair.