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]

*After the fiasco with Bellatrix today, it seemed prudent for Sirius to make himself scarce. Not that he had wanted to, and for a while he had resisted the idea, but after replaying the conversation with Bella over and over in his mind, he couldn't let go of one word: moors. She said she'd kill every dog in the moors. To anyone else, it was meaningless. But Sirius had grown up a Black, been dressed in horrifying little outfits of velvet and lace as a child and dragged to society parties and summer homes and eaten tiny betwitched dancing cakes with those who would become Death Eaters. He had left, certainly, but he couldn't outrun the fact that he had lived the same life Regulus had up to that point, and he understood more than he would have liked of that life. Bellatrix had given him something, in the end. Not much, but something. She feared another dog-shaped theif where Regulus was currently staying. Regulus had run where a Black could--to the Black summer home on the marshes.

With Bellatrix placed firmly in the public eye and awash in the media, there was no one to start killing dogs just to keep him out. And Regulus might move soon. Or Bellatrix might get to him. Or Voldemort might finally figure out whatever the hell he was up to and kill him. So, he told himself, he had to get up there. Not later. Not with Moody's blessing or after all this blows over. Now.

When he arrives a mile away, he becomes a dog and trots along the overgrown road toward the house. Once the house comes into sight, Sirius finally feels he's actually had a bit of luck. There's lights on. Someone is home.

It's been years and years, but the wards still feel the same. He hasn't come here since he was twelve, but that feeling--that itchiness, the smell of ozone--it's all there. He noses around the perimeter carefully, almost leisurely, until he finally finds it: a small grassy hillock within spitting distance of the edge of the ward where the grass is tall enough to hide him from view while he sits and works.*