bait_backup | I can hear you, I've got this tin can with a string through

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I can hear you, I've got this tin can with a string through

*There's blood on the sheets again and for once it isn't Barty's fault. Sticky browning-red spreading out from one corner, expanding like an early universe across the vast, empty vacuum of the duvet.

It does that.

The Black family summer home has an impressive amount of bad habits and ghostly blood is only one of many. Creaking and expansive, its hallways are always rearranging themselves and the doors never seem to lead anywhere twice. It's a bumbling sort of incompetence, sickly and well-meaning and just a little bit tricky, like some curmudgeonly old man with a heart of gold. It can’t, however, out-craft a Crouch. Barty’s bedroom is in the pantry tonight - he’s found it - and he indulges his victory with a cocoon. He’s determined to stay, even with the shelf of biscuits half-merged in the headboard, two tin curves burrowing into his scalp. Above him, the ceiling sags like the turkey neck of a hag, low and drooping and battered, a candle filled hoop twisting fitfully from frail beams. He watches it turn. Back and forth, back and forth. The little flames on the candle dance to the consistent rhythm. His eyeballs dance to it too, disobeying heavy lids. Back and forth, back and forth, back and - still. The flames stand straight up to attention, the hoop stopping with a subtle violence.

It’s a slow and almost imperceptible sound. The purposeful friction of bone and skin against shingle. He can hear it on top of him, like twelve half-dead reindeer pulling a sleigh of rattlesnakes. And then, before there are even thoughts, there are pipes - something slipping under his pores and pumping sand and heaviness into his muscles. It braces against his ribs too, crushing his lungs into pulp and pressing his heart up into his oesophagus. There's no time for whys, no pause for atmospheric build. Instead, shapes merely lose form and meaning, wavering somewhere between existence and a parallel dimension where everything is a rounded, indescribable mass. Even the air is a rounded mass, something viscous and Too Big to enter his nostrils. And just like that it releases Barty with a shock, a sudden and electric relief as oxygen forces its way back into his mouth, inflating him with a wheezing gasp and a shudder that energizes all his limbs and pushes him up until he's a 90 degree angle. Until his eyes open and he realizes nothing has changed. The walls are straight and the furniture is intact, the air as stale and dust-filled as ever.

A part of him knows before he looks, synapses having fired and calculated and arrived well before his head can turn toward the window and see the fluttering tail-end of whatever just scuttled over the roof.

There's blood on the sheets again and now it really is Barty's fault. Sticky deep-red dripping from his nose. *

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*There's a concentrated awake-ness to it, a complex extra dimension of weight and berth, a vomiting forward of all his energy and vigor and livelihood into a single, distinctly misshapen creature. It charts soft, bouncing circles around Regulus, curling to the fit of his back and giving a great, invasive sniff into his ear canal. Barty leans in too, but instead of a snuffling he offers leverage, taking Reg's hand.*

I'll accept that. Your wells I mean. There aren't enough wells anymore, even though there's so much water - and I don't mean the stony-hole-into-the-earth sort. I'll probably give it back though. You need all the well you can get.

*Somehow, standing eye to eye only makes Regulus feel all the more transparent. Barty's speech may not make a terrible amount of sense, especially to his frazzled mind, but it's delivered with such clarity and the diction of a thespian, and he gets a thrill of anxiety that Barty knows very well that all is not as it looks.

With one hand still clapped to his tingling ear he watches a heather bush shiver in the breeze, and hopes he doesn't look sick as well as guilty.*

I'm all right.

I didn't know those things were around here... You won't need to worry about them after tonight.

*There's something uncomfortable in the way Barty sizes Regulus up - sizes up just about anyone. It's unabashed and invasive and alert, like a raccoon whose just discovered an open dumpster. All easy smiles and strange hands, rifling through the litter strewn across Regulus' expression, the detritus evident in every strained muscle.*

You know a lot about them for someone who can't even chase them away. Although I guess that makes sense, doesn't it?

*Though it's Barty, the one person generally permitted to really and carefully look upon Regulus without causing the onset of eventual stage-fright, Reg leans back almost imperceptively under his stare. Hesitantly, nighttime shadows making him look like a concerned skeleton, he guesses at the only non-incriminating answer he has in him.*

'Know thy enemy'... sort of thing?

No. That's not right. You can't ever know a Dementor, but I suppose you get a close look at them without a patronus.

I think I've had much too close a look-

*There's a subtle crack in his voice, but his expression doesn't follow up on it as much as it seems it should. To further the disconnect, he folds arms in what might be a cool ease were it not simply a ploy to make his hands hold still.*

*It's a sudden off-kilter sharpness, an implication of something bug-like and authoritative - something quintessentially up-close and Crouch. The over-critical irritation transforms him in an instant and the hyena gives a warning growl into the backs of Reg's knees. Barty is often in Regulus' personal space, but he only rarely turns into his father.*

Quite enough.

Quite enough of what? Winning the war?

What? No, Barty...

*Slowly unfolding his arms, Regulus sidesteps hesitantly but doesn't really manage to remove himself from between the two very well. The house beckons, and seems very far away.*

I certainly don't want to- live in a country with those sorts of things coming on my property, I should think I speak for you as well.

I should think you shouldn't speak at all - Not until you remember how to talk.

*He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, looking around the dark and glad Dementors don't seem to want to listen to spoken language even if they were around.*

*The inherited expression finally begins to recede, falling back into an upturned and messy childishness, something young and malleable. As if on cue, his nose releases a fresh wave of viscera and Barty wipes at it unthinkingly, painting his cheek with the back of his hand.*

I will if I have to.

*The nauseated dread of those who love the ill gestures frantically toward the dark smear on Barty's face inside Regulus' mind, but he's witnessed so many of these nosebleeds from far less horrific of stimuli from eleven to now. The familiar handkerchief is pulled from the pocket of Regulus' dusty-backed cloak, and brought to Barty's nose as Regulus bows his head in the direction of home.*

*Stowing his wand, Barty is all reddening squares and obliging silence and little dots of discomfort. Underneath him, his feet have finally blossomed into understanding - the sudden, full-fledged knowledge that they're barefoot and now rather bruised from the rocks. They're lonelier too - eight legs reduced to four as his hyena falls behind, paces becoming metres becoming hills. Strangely elongated bounding has stretched it out like spaghetti, causing it to darken and grow unfocused until all that's left is scrubby grass and an unlit moor.*

*Regulus' cloak makes more noise than he does, snaging itself and pulling free of small and greedy scrub as they walk back toward the house. Barty's strange quiet mouth breathing that accompanies nosebleeds rings in his ears more than anything, however.

He's relieved to be alone with him now, not liking the company of spectral animals any more than that of Dementors, despite the comforting implications of Barty's patronus. A memory that happy is needed right about now, and by the time they reach the door Reg has landed on the uncomfortable thought that he can't find one of his own to match it - a foreboding embarrassment that he waves away as he holds the door.*

...Lightheaded?

I'd rather be light than heavy. Gravity is never very convenient.

*Bolts slide shut behind them, old magic locking them in, and Regulus looks over his shoulder with a strange mix of emotion somewhere between worry and exhausted dissatisfaction as he turns the iron key in the lock. This overkill is almost ritualistic in this house, and for all his bravery Barty seems to take none of it as seriously as Regulus wishes he would.*

Keeps you on the ground.

Yes, exactly. That's the problem. Everyone likes being on it but no one wants to be in it - I'm just cutting out the middle-man.

*Barty pulls away the handkerchief, revealing only the bright, coppery after-sheen of freshly wiped blood. He hands it back to Regulus, thoroughly soiled.*

You'd be a lot happier if you weren't so fussy - It was only a spurt.

We came here to avoid spurts.

No, we came here because you were scared and fear never comes in spurts.

We should be scared.

*It's somewhat of a cliché, something that seems as though it should be said in jest or as a mocking threat, but Regulus' eyes are much too earnest for either of those to be true. Somehow, he says it with the same sincerity of breaking the news of the death of a loved one, a situation where mocking word choice would just seem cruel.*

Who knows who else can find us here.

Anyone could. It's pretty obvious. I go missing, you go missing, we're friends, you're a depressed aristocrat who happens to have a death-manor in the middle of nowhere...

I'm not-

*His voice is still soft but by the look of him Barty's words feel like a slap. He clutches the bloodied handkerchief in twisting fingers, burrowing and wrapping them in it's thin and contaminated material.*

This is not a death-manor, we're not going to die. Why do you have to be so flippant, for goodness' sake, it's horrible. These things aren't anything to make light of.

*The turn of his lips is irritating, filled with something sage and affectionate and unfathomable. The look of a boy who knows infinitely more than he lets on, who finds Regulus' attempts at morality and wisdom inherently cute.

Barty had been the one to see thestrals first. Regulus, nervous and unsorted and eleven, hadn't believed him. It's in these moments that Barty thinks maybe he still doesn't.*

Haven't you been listening? Death doesn't have anything to do with gravity. I mean, maybe if you fall from high up, obviously - but on a whole. If you only give it heaviness you'll never be rid of it. It's the middle-man.

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