No more singing, no more laughing, no more sunny days

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*It’s a churning sort of night; an upset stomach split open and peeled back, visceral acid-carved lining congealed and blackened toward ruffled hills. Everything is half-digested grass and half-digested air and half-digested details. Fuzzy, unfocused breaks in the uniform pattern which seem to waver and disappear. They play on peripherals and press against skulls - a tightening headache, an incubating cold, blotches of something not-quite solid against the skin. The ward is self-assured like that. It isn’t terribly heavy; it doesn’t expect to be found.

But it does leave plenty of warning. A parameter of low humming and naked birds nesting in their own feathers - of the distinct and deeply unpleasant feeling of disinfectants scrubbed raw against pores, of being pressed through a sterile, plastic vein and squirted into existence on the other end.

Most of all, there’s the house, rising up like a stooped vagrant, unsteady, indigestible and perpetually alive, alive with meaning and history and, more recently, light. It bounces across windows, causing rooms to come alive and die in scheduled, choreographed bursts. There are walls in between of course, constricts of time and space and drywall that are going ignored, but the house and the family that built it have only rarely followed the rules.*

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[fleasaremurder.livejournal.com]

*As the wand flies from his hand, and the fire flickers out, leaving him to gasp raggedly at nothing in the darkness, Sirius has time to reflect how completely idiotic it was to come here, to follow that damn hyena. He's going to die here for no damn reason besides his own bull-headed stupidity, and Regulus is going to be left to the tender mercies of Bellatrix, and that's the end of it. He grits his teeth and fumbles at the door at his left, then the next, in the futile hope that something will open--a window, hole in the wall, anything.*

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*It's distinctly diagonal - the angled, fleshy sound of someone veering and buckling into a wall. It's companionship. Companionship in lack of foresight and lack of air and desperate, hurried fumbling. The doors burst inwards, an implosion of sound and a rush of relief and mostly an end to the game. The wheezing comes before Barty's wand, its tip buried into the back of Sirius' neck, his planned one liner lost in his own strained gulping.*

[fleasaremurder.livejournal.com]

*It's the wheezing that warns him, and when the wandpoint presses, he's ready. Sirius reaches up to grab it, finding the middle of the thin wooden thing and closing his fist around hit. He wrenches it forward over his shoulder with all the strength lent by panic, desperation, and fury.*