Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, killed the old and preferred the youth

[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*The edges aren’t as blurry now. The tenuous connections in his mind, the rarely noticed bridges between thoughts and concepts, that very basis for organized thinking that had gone so errant and fractal since his mother’s death, have finally realigned. Like the roving stairs of Hogwarts, they’ve attached themselves to all the right floors, allowing Barty safe passage to run up and down them in freshly inspired frenzy. This frenzy isn’t wholly without a destination, however, and Barty finds himself using the map on his chest to guide him. The scar is still there, raw and pink and raised and mangled. It’s lasted for months and it will likely last for many more, if not forever.

Alastor Moody’s spell hadn’t been very fierce, very cunning or very evil. It had been blunt, a simple attack that should have led to a simple mending. Yet, its lingering, wayward soreness remains, a twisted keepsake of everything Barty and his mother had shared and still do. It’s a badge of weakness, proof-positive of something faulty and ill-wired inside him. It had seemed so inconsequential two weeks ago, but now it’s unbearable. Even in his heaviness, his retreat into a boxed-in world of damask walls and muffled voices and soft bed sheets, he had always known where it was, been struck by a sudden and all consuming awareness of its position and texture. It’s what finally had stirred him and pulled him back to proper consciousness unwillingly in ways Regulus had failed to do. It’s what still pulls him now, it’s what inspires him.

For a plan constructed over morning pancakes, Barty looks as determined and weathered as a man who’s ruminated over this for years. His fists are filled with Floo powder, his back is filled with brick wall and the atrium is full of people. The throng moves as one complete, undulating organism - like algae in an ocean current. They file into fireplace after fireplace as the ensuing jets of flame heat the hall like a sauna. He isn’t really sure why he’s doing it, or what any of this will prove – but every fibre in his body yearns for this coming release, for a perfect righting of the scales, for the world’s staircases to seem as well-amalgamated as the ones now in his head.*

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[ocularlunacy.livejournal.com]

*On all sides Moody is surrounded by a mass of robed workers filling the grand Ministry corridor with swishing echoes of fabric and voices. It is a sea of professional blacks and standardized uniforms that he has fought his way through on a daily basis for most of his life now, something familiar and commonplace even to a man as watchful as he is. Unless one waits until the last godly hours of the day are spent to head home, there is no way to avoid the swarm of people eager to jump into the fire and shed their skins until the morning. There is no other choice but to join them. He has his eyes set on a slightly less crowded public fireplace, and his mind set on the files locked inside his desk for the day.

His head aches dully, just behind his eyes, from an entire day spent staring into surveillance photographs, watching the shifting shoulders and smug backs of the guilty and faceless. Though these people take up his dreams, though he falls asleep almost every night attempting to work out just what they might think of before they slip off to dream, his instincts fail him now. In this moment, it is his obsession that leads to his ultimate distraction, and all his thoughts on the people in those files let him miss their very real, very physical accomplice catching up to him in the monotonous evening rush.*