(a little snippet of part ten, to show you i am working on it, i promise 😅)
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Woken up by Israeli drones. Circling over Sweden. They are raining down Avada Kedevra-s on a beach-side house. Kasper takes a curse to the chest and collapses to the ground. Aoife finds herself surprisingly bereft. At the funeral, his mother says she hadn’t seen him in decades and tearingly asks Aoife if she loved him. A question she ponders over for a second before saying, ‘No.’ His mother nods, ‘Tak,’ before Disapparating.
Her eyes wide open, now.
It’s night time again. She’s hungry. She needs to pee. The mess of her bedroom lit by the streetlights outside. An ambulance’s siren in the distance. Once they’d crossed the border, the first time Kasper asked was at the safe house. Before the ceasefire. They’d spent the day at the hospital in Khan Younis, elbow-deep in dust and dried blood. She was interviewing a boy with a collapsed lung and a woman who’d lost half her face in a strike that hit a school. They’d run out of gauze by midday. The power kept getting cut. The air tasted like iron and chlorine. At night, they stayed in a ground-floor flat rented out by MSF, heavy shutters and sandbags stacked behind the windows. Fifteen people and one toilet they had to refill with buckets of water. They weren’t allowed to turn on the lights after dark - it would have been too easy to spot from the air. When the generator ran, you could charge your phone, boil water, maybe get ten minutes of BBC before the signal dropped again. Aoife was quiet and clean and she made herself small. Helped with the meals and moving furniture around. Made herself useful. A skill she’s long since known allows you to blend into the décor without much fuss even after you got in through the chimney. You clock the rules quick, never complain, and you do as you’re told.
She sat in the corner. Couldn’t sleep at the time. It was the shelling that was the hardest. The way you never know where it’ll drop next. As far as she’s concerned, it’s a form of psychological torture. And, what it leaves in its wake. The rubble and the dead. She fell and opened her arm on an iron pole once, because her foot caught in a child’s leg. They never found the body it belonged to.
When Kasper asked, she quietly scoffed. A couple of aid workers snoring away on dirty mattresses spread out on the floor.
He smirked. Low, amused whisper. ‘Is it the war that’s a turn off?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
Got laid in ‘97, if you must know.
‘What?’
‘Not’ing.’
She scooted closer to the wall. Laid her head against the angle of the room and gently closed her eyes. The scarf she covered her hair with during the days when she needed to, now acting as a pillow. ‘Sometimes, it’s just you that’s a turn off, Kas.’ She didn’t want him to touch her.
He layered the hurt in sarcasm. ‘Right.’
They had sex after the ceasefire.
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