when you're away when i am missing you

[August Echelon-Arnost]

January 1st 1883, challenge day 6.

It was officially New Year's Day and it was snowing. August contemplated, for a moment, staying inside. It was cold and he had - at least in theory - better things to do. Except he didn't. He went out on the porch and lit the pipe Thom had gotten him.

When he had gotten run over by the carriage, it had been snowing.

But it had also been November. August had been nineteen, and he had enjoyed protests because they were protests. Powerful, with signs and posters and screaming. They met the most interesting people and sometimes gave fake names, fake stories. On the night he had gotten hit, he had claimed his name was Wednesday, that he was a halfblood, and that he had been a Gryffindor in school.

While this protest was in muggle London, most of the people August and his friends had talked to were wizards. Some of them had known he was lying. Some of them had lied about themselves. The point had not been to make friends. It was to prove a point. Sometimes even August had been unsure what point they were trying to prove, but he had been into protesting then, not debating or talking. Some of the people he met would later become his friends - but none that he had met there.

So August (or Wednesday) raised champagne glasses with his comrades and waved posters and yelled. It started snowing around three in the morning and chaos started erupting soon afterwards - the protest got rowdy, and Wednesday, his friends, and several other witches and wizards remained out of most of it. Magic was unfair and would break the statute of secrecy - and most of them agreed that fighting like a muggle was ridiculous and undignified.

But causing a little havoc had seemed like fun, so they catcalled a little, and someone - August never did find out who - startled a horse that had a carriage attached to it. And August was hit with it.

The first thing he had realized - apart from the fact that he was in a lot of pain - was that there was snow on the side of his face. August was brushing it off and quite possibly in shock when someone reached down, grabbed his arm firmly, and apparated him off to Saint Mungos. He was in recover there for a while before he got out, but then when he was free (to hobble around on a cane and sit in his parents house dwelling in self pity before finally moving to Ottery) it was mid-December and snowing once more.

August put out the pipe. There was snow in his hair and he sort of felt like wallowing in self pity again, although Lyra telling him not to write her anymore was not worse than his accident.

Probably. Well, that's a little melodramatic, August thought, this certainly isn't worse than getting stuck with a limp for the rest of your life. Even if you are used to the limp by now - you'll get used to this too. He supposed this made inviting Sam to town pointless but, well, they'd have to see how that one went.

He kicked at the snow a little. 1883, it was snowing, and he was feeling morose.

Snowflakes killed everything, if there were enough of them. They covered the plants and froze them for months, and they would freeze people too if they got the chance. But when they went away, things came back.

Snow meant things were beginning.

It also meant things were ending.

But his career in politics had not ended, it had just changed. He actually cared about such things now. He introduced himself properly now - 'my name is August, my last name is both ridiculous and long, and I was living in Ottery St. Catchpole until recently.' He was slightly less insufferable, he hoped.

It meant it was time to move on?

August sighed and went back inside, closing the door behind him. His housekeeper would judge him for being morose again, but if he got sick again she would probably just smother him to spare herself the secondhand embarrassment of watching that.