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

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*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. *

Comments

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*It sounds so mild that Regulus' tensed muscles and raised shoulders seem rather contrary and out of place. His scapulae point fearfully out at Barty, even from beneath his cloak, but his gaze remains on the glass.*

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*There's an idle moment and then there's a hand. Freckled and pale and slowly invading Regulus' line of vision from the left, fingers wiggling. It's a distinctly muggle attempt to break a distinctly unmagical spell.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Regulus' stare is only partially visible. With the pained and private way he stands supporting himself against counter, he's all twisted with weight on one foot, turned half away from Barty. He seems almost entirely unseeing of the waving hand in front of him, oddly transfixed as he tries to soldier silently through not just frustration but pain.

His bad leg, so often forced to do more than it should, screams at him now and mirrors a horrible feeling in his chest - a sort of tense radiation, filling him from the inside out with a hard bubble of excruciating energy. There is a constant numbed sting he experiences from knee to hip, but being knocked to the ground has flared that pain into something he can only be silent about. Only bite the inside of his cheek and wait for it to recede to manageability again.

That is one moment. In the next his hand is grasping Barty's, and pushing it away with a frantic release, like someone clutching a hot iron.*

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*The reflex is childish, it's hurt. A fluttering of confused limbs and strange signals and barely-covered-territory. Barty has been pushed away all his life. By his father, by the neighbour children, by the oft used phrase, "Not now, I'm busy". Regulus had always been the one to pay him the courtesy of attention and in all their disagreements he's never once been pushed away - not properly, not physically. But exceptional measures breed exceptional results - his tangle of appendages reorient themselves, gain energy and force and shove back with a violent and crestfallen shock.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Though just as perpetually dismissed, Regulus has never once in his life been shoved. Rejection has never been a fear of his, true, because he only very seldom sought attention in the first place. Still, no one had once laid a hand on him, how very much they happened to find him unfavourable or uninteresting, and the entire event is as shocking to him as it is to Barty, and feels as filthy as a bar fight.

Tossed like a rag doll away from the counter, he lands ungracefully on his other foot in surprise, and a horrible electric pang of bruised and blackened nerves makes him squeak like a trodden on rat and brings tears to his eyes.

There is a beat. Regulus scrubs his face dry but his mouth remains open in pain and indignation.*

...You pushed me!

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*He's always three steps ahead, a time traveller of precious seconds, constantly racing the world and often winning. But sometimes there's hesitation, one slightly too-slow remark, a clumsy gesture, the climatic and momentary failure when he's robbed of riddles and understanding and the world finally careens into his backside, launching forward less than clever words.*

No. Nonono. I rescued you. YOU'RE the real pusher here.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

How dare you do that, don't you understand? I can't run, I certainly will not be shoved - all I can do is keep you here and you run out into the night where anyone could come and take you away from me. And now you've hurt me!

*There is no discipline here, no subtlety, and no reservations. Regulus was raised to only have an inside voice, and no others, making his yelling a very odd and strained thing to hear indeed, but there's nothing funny about it.

His face looks hollow and his cheeks pale, and there's something just slightly off about his eyes that has been building in there since before graduation and only just now reached an age mature enough to be really seen.*

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*The trouble with being crashed into is that it launches more than words and Barty is suddenly much too far ahead.*

I warned you. I told you gravity can't be trusted - and now you sound like a squeaky, old ship. I can tell it's a ship because there's little waves in your muscles. You may as well become a sea captain.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*This unnerving cleverness of Barty's, to have his words run and run and never stop, leaping logic in single bounds, confuding parents and professors and peers en masse, and finding sea captains in the voices of boys still too short and vernal to be called men - it's something Regulus could never make heads nor tails of, but has almost always liked. This makes it all the more startling when Barty's barrage of half-shared thoughts is interrupted, before it really gets a chance to get going, by the smash of crystal on the cold floor.

Regulus' glass and all it's poorly poured contents spray in hundreds of pieces between them, and his arm remains incriminatingly raised after swatting it from the counter. The familiar lilt of Barty's voice, the manic cadence of it, is finally overpowered by something, and Regulus feels a panic, not sure if he's ready for Barty to ever be quiet.*

STOP. ...If you say more I know I'll just scream.

You never stop to listen, Barty! I could tell you a dozen times and you think I'm joking but the world can't be laughed at anymore, it just can't! Everywhere's all broken up into pieces and no one does as they should, and not even you will listen to me! Why won't you just stay inside and not go out there anymore and not shove me! That hurt.

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*Barty Crouch, Jr. is not a flincher. He's withstood the might of fake punches and elastic band slaps, of pinches and horror films - he even withstood getting Marked. He's lived his entire life without tight corners or rat traps - a world filled with space and movement - a roominess he can inhabit and command with all the stupid bravery of a Spartan warrior on cocaine. So when his jaw snaps shut and his whole body jerks backwards, heart worming up into his oesophagus like a determined, wriggly puppy, there is no familiarity of experience. No context for his reaction. No precedence.

He flinches.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*It's one of the few times that Regulus' silence seems transferred out of him and into the only available vessel. However, though he has everything to say dancing around inside by his teeth he isn't sure just how to spit the rest of them out. His own shouting has startled him nearly as much as it has Barty.*

SO-

So try harder because - you have to understand! No one thinks to even ask me about anything, but they should! For their sake they should! And you have to be careful, why don't you know that?

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*It isn't exactly a crowd-rousing speech. Regulus' words are fumbling and weak-winded, faithless words falling out of a faithless mouth. Barty can see the confused frustration, gluing syllables together with the unpleasant, vague stickiness of children-safe paste. The affected tenor of his own voice is unexpected.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

You already have your own answers. Not everyone's as brave as you and they would be stupid to be so.

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*At the word 'stupid' Barty's eyes are all at once very big and very close - flared nostrils letting out an angry jet of warm air in Regulus's face.*

Oooh well that's good for you, isn't it. Any smarter and you'd be a SOULLESS HUSK.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Regulus' hands raise at his sides but he doesn't push. With too many truths to keep under his hat and too many horrible if's that could happen any day now he can hardly think of what to say. Like a broken record with good intentions, he spits out a woeful retort.

Even though he had never been in any more danger than usual with the Dementors, Barty's anger makes his stomach flip as though just realising fear.*

They could have gone after you next! Or those men from your flat could have come here - we're here so that YOU are safe!

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*Like most impossible, concentrated centres, Barty has an event horizon. A ring of blind spots and unknowing as precariously afloat as a spinning hula hoop. It's constantly wrapped there, an internal invisibility cloak that hides his own eccentricities and makes him an exhibitionist to everyone but himself. He sees nothing ironic in his words.*

You make no SENSE.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*If anyone has kept Barty safe from his own ironies it has been Regulus. He has perhaps even tended to them, let them grow long and wild like the irritating locks of hippies Regulus is so relieved to see being cut lately. Still, this cannot escape even him.*

How is that possible? You're doing this right alongside me, you're always right there to see, everything that goes wrong. How do you not understand yet - you're in more danger than we could ever stop!

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

Nothing goes wrong. It only goes. That's how we know we've done well. If nothing changed we'd fail.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Barty is unavoidable to look at, and Regulus feels pinned by his words even more than usual in this dismal, grey kitchen, where Barty is the only splash of colour burning. Something about his very contrast is eerie, but it eggs on Regulus' insistence as well.*


If you get caught - anywhere, in any of this, that's not change that's ruining, Barty!

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

YOU KNOW WHAT - I hope I do. Then I'll have permission. Then everything will be in place. Did you think all this was an accident? I needed it, so it happened. I asked for this, I wanted it.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

How could you want this!

*There is fanaticism leaking from somewhere, fueling Barty as Regulus frantically tries to patch the break. He's spent months protecting, lying, researching, standing guard, and it all boils down now to a screech in his voice. It's all birdlike, the shrill and tired despair of the elderly watching their families fall apart and their possessions stolen, and he could only stop it if he stopped talking entirely.*

This isn't about your plans with Him, Barty, it's not what He's promised you, that's not why we're here. It's about you, you're in danger. We're all - I hate you, I hate your carelessness! You can't be hurt, you just can't, why won't you try?

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well you - you're a cravat. You're puffy and wrapped around a bird-neck somewhere stupid and fancy. Spending all your little time getting expensively dry-cleaned and perfectly tied - and god forbid you get spilled on with JAM. Stainlessness is cowardly. You're cowardly. You don't have faith in anything, Regulus. Not really, not the right way. You're just like Malfoy or Mulciber, they don't believe a word either. Well I do. I believe every word and I'll take ALL the jam. And I'll be grateful for it.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

I am not a coward!

*Barty's words overpower his own. Where they project to the empty hallways of this house, it seems there is only a certain decimal to which Regulus' voice can strain. Despite this, there is an unearthed sharpness there, a desperation and a will that makes up for his failing vocals. Surrounded by glass, shouting as best he can but with little hope to win, his hands shake with alarming brutality, with fear, nerves, and anger.*