always vigilant

Dementors have no face. 

This you learn if you have ever seen any Kiss performed, they have no face so to speak, just a skull-like thing with which they suck out the soul. 

What you will not hear is how they look, for just a moment, once they have fed on a soul. For just a moment they look almost human - not quite, they are inhuman beasts and this is never forgotten - but there is, suddenly, a face there. It can last several minutes, depending on the age and vitality of the victim, but these faces are never… right.

If you have seen the dead you know. If you have seen inferi or an mer going from peaceable to angered, you have some idea. It is that soaked, rotting beauty you see in the moments while it still looks human enough to be mistaken for living. It is an eerie beauty, a fey one, one which strikes a chill more even than the one gathered from watching the Kiss.

They have faces, those few seconds, but not of anything known as living.

— Excerpt from An Appraisal of the Evils of Azkaban: Dementors, Damnation and Devils by Arcturus Axe.

Send me☝for my character’s private thoughts about your character.

To think Mum used to gush about this man. Not in the way she did about new laws and Dad’s ice cream, but with genuine respect, like he was the Auror equivalent of a sun.

Can’t say I don’t feel the same. He burns bright and harsh; I remember when he used to be hard on me. Probably the worst of the lot, because I saw how he treated the others. Maybe it was his way of letting me prove myself to everyone else.

Now I would follow him to the ends of the earth, if that’s what it took for justice to be exacted. Despite everything, I think he’s a man after my own heart.

Send me の for my character’s opinion of yours in three words.

☂ - Our characters get stormed in together

☏ - One (or both) of our characters is using the telephone for the first time

✎ - Our characters are supposed to be doing homework but get bored and/or distracted

∞ - A scene between our characters 10 years from now, if the war ceased to exist

☒ - My character is the reason yours dies

♚ - Our characters have a night in the pub

ϟ - One of our characters has a panic attack

☼ - Our characters have a child together

✪ - First date

❣ - “Because I’m in love with you, idiot!”

⚥ - One of our characters is caught in a compromising position.

➳ - Our characters serve detention together (or one of them is supervising the other’s detention)

❝ - Reference to Remus’s “furry little problem” 

✈ - My character’s first time riding a broom (or another experience, feel free to specify)

✿ - Headcanon: My character’s first kiss

♥ - The moment my character realizes they’re in love

☯ - Flash forward AU: our characters’ children get married 

☢ - “If you don’t tell him/her, I swear to god I will!”

▲ - My character confesses something to yours

♭- Both of our characters as muggles

☾- One of our characters shows up to the other’s place drunk.

↮ - Our characters are trapped in a broom closet (or other small space) together

★ - My character having a fantasy/wet dream

♠ - Love potion: My character is slipped it and comes on to yours

♜- Midnight snacks

✂ - Divorce

☺- Kiddos: how our characters would have acted (or did act) together as children

☞- Our characters move in together

✖ - Envy

ღ - Desire

☌ - Insecurity

✔- AU where one of your character’s ships is now a student/teacher relationship (you pick who is who)

Σ - My character comes back to teach at Hogwarts

ø - My character suffers from amnesia and can’t remember yours

¢- Someone loses a bet

⚔ - Adrenaline

♫- Five songs I think of when you think of my ship

♩- Five songs I think of when I think of your ship

✛ - Dreamcast my character’s kid(s)

☸ - My character at their lowest of lows; your character encounters mine (opt)

☮ - In a perfect world…

✑ - An entry from my character’s journal

❦ - My ship doing something that should stay behind closed doors 

✯- “Before you, I didn’t have this problem!”

♙- My character dreams of their future

♟- My character dreams of your character’s future

♣ - Felix Felicis 

♦ - Our characters during a raid

➤ - 13 Going On 30 AU: My character wakes up 7 years from now with no recollection of what has happened in the meantime

❄ - Mistletoe

☃- Our characters act like they’re twelve

℉ - Dog days of summer

≠ - Cutting loose ends

ℳ - Marry me

⌘ - Our characters dance together

✌ - Winning

♛ - “Screw this!”

✞ - Our characters attend a funeral or visit a tombstone

♮- Our characters as old geezers

♯ - Babies

☟ - “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”

☀ - Pets

♞ - Dark Horse: Your character surprises mine (specify how)

The glowing end was snubbed out without further ado against the brick wall at his back, eyes— though dark as coals— glinting almost as bright in the dim light of the buzzing streetlamp. It had been months of antsy anticipation since they had last been together. Whether the night ended with them too drunk to care that they were coiled around one another on the floor of Moody’s den or too drunk to care that they were pounding fists into one another’s face out back of the bar was entirely up in the air. Either end was desirable; both had been found before; both would be found again. 

They existed to temper each other, these two troubled men who had bonded over brotherhood and blood alike. A swift blow to the face meant just as much as a hug ever could and would do Kingsley just as well. He needed— desperately— to be rid of the tense ball of angst coiling ever tighter in the pit of his stomach. Moody would do as nothing else could, even a warm and willing mouth or a firm arse between his grasping fingers.

And it was nice, nice having someone who knew what he liked, nice having someone who demanded nothing more from him than he was willing to give. (Or in this case, pay for.) Nora backed off when he asked and advanced when he allowed it, and seemed to have an innate sense for where his boundaries lay and an instinctual sense of timing for when it was appropriate to push, and for this, he was grateful. So, yes, he did not notice his brother enter the bar past the beauty teasing her hand up his thigh, inch by painful inch, her nimble fingers wrapping around him through the denim of his pants; but where he failed, she easily succeeded.

“I didn't know you had a boyfriend, Alastor,” came her teasing tone, and it was only the word that allowed him to snap out of whatever spell she was weaving to tilt his head in acknowledgment of Kingsley. You don't look happy, brother. If he didn't know any better, Moody would have guessed his old friend looked jealous. That was, of course, madness.

His glass re-appeared and soon after it a black leather wallet was slammed down on the table in front of her. No sooner had she picked it up than he was warning her against stealing it. She scoffed, “Steal one drink and suddenly you’re branded a thief. I’m not a klepto Mo—mister.” The wallet flipped open and she traced her fingers over the badge inside. So he was an Auror. It could be fake, but she didn’t think it was. He had a cop face, cop demeanor, cop bossiness. Carefully, she put the wallet back down on the table and nudged it back over to his side. Baloo must be so proud, Mowgli. 

Or she presumably wasn't a threat. Moody had no sooner caught the waitresses eye to signal for another when Daisy stuttered over the word, and for a sharp moment he thought she might have slipped on the name he distinctly remembered not giving her. Dark eyes flicked over to the girl in question before they narrowed faintly, watching her as she examined his badge. But she returned it, so what could she possibly--?

Daisy’s eyes darted around the pub, wondering which of the “bastards” would have it out for her if they knew she was a muggleborn. Definitely that big, stupid looking bloke by the bar and probably the harpie who’d returned her wine four times because it was the wrong vintage. Her lips pursed together and she crossed her arms, muttering, “Shopping. Right. Left me here to bother you, must be your lucky day.” The lie pissed her off, but there was nothing to be done about the ignorance of purebloods. Centuries of inbreeding had left them too stupid and stubborn to change. 

Before he could think to answer, he huffed as a ripple of visible disgust tempered by self-righteous indignation crossed his face. "A janitor? Do I look like a bloody janitor?" Moody launched into grumbled reassurances to himself that he did not in fact look like a janitor as he slid the pack he'd earlier pulled out back into his pocket to be immediately lost for the next time he needed it, and, as an afterthought, wrapped his fingers around his wand to re-conjure the glass she'd so kindly stolen from him and set it upside down on the table. When his hand reemerged, he was holding a slightly-beaten black leather wallet, which he thumped on the table next to the glass for her to look at if she was so inclined. (A janitor. Really!) He, meanwhile, turned to spot where a waiter might be.

Honest to god, she could not catch a damn break. Mowgli was a cop, and he’d seen her do magic. As of yet he couldn’t prove she wasn’t seventeen, but it wouldn’t be hard to do. Daisy had never dealt with the Ministry, she didn’t entirely know what the consequences would be, but she knew they were told every year that underage magic could be met with suspension or expulsion. Well, if that was all there was to it, who the hell cared? Her chin rose a notch as she remembered that the punishment (for the magic at least) was one she was already suffering. Might as well do the crime since she was already doing the time. 

The latter, it seemed. It took him an additional few seconds to place the word as Daisy oh-so-helpfully (finally) answered, having to remember church as the English kirk. Religion, singing, loud instruments and fancy clothes: definitely Muggleborn, though Moody couldn't decide with any certainty one way or the other if she'd refrained from revealing as much because she was a brat, or because she was a brat who knew better than to let people know her blood status. "Hmph. Still lyin'. They're shoppin' through Diagon an' dropped you off here acause you're annoyin' them." This was wrong and he knew it, yet he said it evenly with a pointed look for her. Don't say otherwise.

Not that anyone’s laughter at her dissuaded her from what she did. She was the one with poisonous leaves before her, being called upon to identify them, and that was enough for her to feel legitimate. Head Auror Moody, if he was gruff and watched her like he expected her to take the leaves and run, left her alone enough to do her job without interruption.

He pushed the file toward her, no doubt intending her to read it, but she had no need for files. Everything was in the plant; getting information from him would just speed her deductions along. Selina glanced at the folder and considered another use for it: she transferred the plant from her hand onto the thick cover, procured a thin blade from her sleeve, and neatly sliced the largest leaf in half. The purple-veined outside gave way to a dark green pulp, wet and thicker than it should have been.

She touched the cut edge to her tongue briefly, holding it cradled in her palm as her cheeks sucked in. Sour. Wrong. Distinctly wrong.

"Hellebore," she announced, finally, dropping the plant back with its fellows. "Picked early and given properties of a green tuber. That’s where the hypothermia’s coming from, but it’s hidden well. Takes someone talented to cross two incompatible plants, but there’s Dark magic in it, too. This one—" she tapped the scattered leaves with a finger "—isn’t potent. Too dry. Your poisonings are a practice run for something worse. It’s likely the cousins, the last two, know the poisoner; poisoning a child takes knowledge of the family and who is most diligent about what the child eats and drinks.

He froze. He absolutely froze and ceased breathing for a few seconds as fire hippie lady scooped up the leaf and stuck her goddamn tongue on it. Gods. She's tasting it. Who the fuck tastes a poison?! Every single one of his lessons with various poisons and toxins had all boiled down to teaching him, time and time again, that the absolute last thing one should do when facing any harmful substance was to put their tongue on it to check for taste. Alastor wasn't sure whether he ought to start laughing hysterically or find the first Healer he could drag back to his office, and wondered what he would have to do to cover his own ass should she drop dead in front of his desk. When he was trained to take over for the last Head, he'd very conveniently forgotten to cover the delicate subject of “what to do if a batshit insane herbologist starts taste testing poisons in your office”. Frankly, he was now offended that had been skipped.

Then she was-- talking, she was talking and she wasn't dying, and it was still a few moments yet before Moody could relax enough to breathe or remembered to wipe the expression of alarmed shock from his face. The moment Sapworthy appeared to be done with the plant cuttings spread across the thick paper of the folder, he reached forward to set the tips of three fingers down atop the file and drag it back to his side of the desk as if he was worried leaving them within convenient reach of the woman across from him was no longer a threat to him, but a threat to her. Hell, he was still too surprised to bother cutting her off and explaining this was not his first poisoning and he could reach his own conclusions about the implications at work, thank you very much. Though-- he gave his head a small shake as he heard she was as unsure how he'd managed to acquire the samples. “They need funding.” I don't know what for.

But that was information she didn't need to know and he didn't intend to share. Attempting to marshal himself, Alastor continued, eyes flicking to the vial she still hold every now and again. Why the fuck did you lick it?! “Thank you. Need two more things from you: one, a written statement sayin' as much as you've told me now-- mostly, I need your thoughts about any Dark magic used in the combination so I can get my arrest,” as the arrest of the dealer would give him an avenue to find whoever was supplying it, “an' I need to know if there's anything special we can do antidote-wise to counteract it in case we cannae find the suppliers fast enough.”

"Bloody hell, Alastor." Molly growled at him. Molly really didn’t want to get into it with Alastor Moody about what she is capable of doing, not again. "Just tell me what you need so you can fix the damn things so I can take care of my kids." 

Another frown gathered across his lips and then deepened as his brows stitched together and he gave his head a small shake, the expression too well put together to be believably sincere. (Fortunately, believable wasn't high on his list of priorities.) “S'not me you should be apologizin' to. After all, you're the one failin' to protect those five bairns a' yours you love throwin' at me as if they were relevant-- an' I enjoy your use a' the term “safe house”.” His voice dipped as he leaned forward a few inches, as if the door that seperated them and the children inside wasn't defense enough against whatever else he intended to say. “Forgive me, but I don't see the point a' usin' that word on a house that isn't in the least bit safe.” And it really wasn't, so much so that it struck him as laughable. What meager defenses must have been mustered at some point or another had been allowed to wither far past the point he considered acceptable.

Straightening up, his expression smoothed as he slipped his hands into his pockets and abruptly appeared to lose interest in whatever little snark-off the pair of them had decided to slip into, turning his face away instead as his eyes scanned over the generous yard again. The property had one thing going for it, he'd admit: it was remote enough that a random discovery was rather low on the list of possibilities. “I've told you what you need, an' I'm not big on repeatin' myself, but I will for your sake. I need you to keep your littlins inside an' away from any doors or windows-- they might interfere, an' I cannae promise breakin' one ward while I set 'em up will end well.”

"What lies do you typically hear then?" she asked. Odds were that he wouldn’t answer the question, but then he seemed to be sharing more than he intended. Besides, if he got to ask impertinent questions, so did she. 

Never one to have much of a poker face, Daisy didn’t even try to cover her grimace as he asked where her parents were and continued to refer to her as ‘Little One’. 

"'I'm innocent,' is the biggest one," he answered simply. There: if she was too dense to gleam the fact of his being in law enforcement from such an answer, then this entertainment was far more unfair than he originally assumed and he'd have to go out of a sense of pity for the braindead child across from him. It was no fun attempting to figure out a simpleton; there was nothing for him to figure out. (Something nasty in him made fun of how he chose to take his amusements, but Moody was an old hat at ignoring such feelings.)

It had gotten out of hand and quickly, as these things were wont to. 

The man’s body had gained fifty pounds, it felt, between when Kingsley had pushed him into the wall and when he’d crumpled to the ground. There was nothing at all different between this round out back of the bar and any other he’d partaken in, having picked the bad habit up from his partner, save for the poorly placed patch of ice and the sizeable metal peg sticking out where a brick had chipped around it. Bad timing and absolutely shitty luck conspired together to leave Kingsley with an enormous corpse and a puddle of hot blood creeping red into the snow at his feet. 

The screams had attracted his attention. He knew the boisterous sounds that came hand in hand with this seedier cesshole of London; knew them well enough to differentiate between the screeches of women having a laugh and the screeches of one decidedly not. He might have been inclined to tug his collar up around his face and carry on as the rest of the near-abandoned street seemed all too happy to do had his conscious not laid in on him to the extreme. His thick body rounded the corner and seemed to fill the mouth of the tiny alley before he could think twice about what he was doing, already hurling threats at the piece of shit with his pants around his ankles and his hands up the sobbing girl’s skirts. 

Blind rage and something akin to panic stopped him from drawing his wand, something he’d be loathe to admit to those who had a hand in training him. When the cunt took a swing Kingsley had hit back and hit hard, shoving him square in the chest, ripping his feet out from under him— 

— smashing his head back against brick and iron with a sickening crack of a thud and a low groan from his prone body. His cock was still hard, Kingsley realized, vision seeming to tunnel, and he had to snarl at the girl before she gathered her senses enough to flee. 

By then it was too late. Kingsley wasn’t and would never be a Healer, but even he knew that naught could be done for a bloke once he was well and truly gone. Gone by his hand— by his bare hand, and with a witness to boot.

Fucking dammit! 

Desperate times, desperate measures— and only one man would ever carry the brunt of Kingsley’s respect and trust. An enlargement charm on the interior of the hard briefcase he carried created a cavern large enough to shove the floppy corpse inside, hands stained red from his efforts, lips curled back from his teeth. His job involved looking at dead bodies— contorting them into small spaces, on the other hand, had always been the responsibility of the sort of wizard he captured, threw in Azkaban to rot— the sort of wizard he now was. 

And as such he found himself standing sheepish and wide-eyed on Moody’s front porch, briefcase sat upright at its side, leaking crimson slow and sure from the crack and into the snow as he waited for his brother to answer the damned door. 

As annoyed as he was with the season and its holidays and its stupid goddamn lighted pixies who the fuck thought they were a good idea, all of it had combined to warn him big time that he needed to figure out some sort of gift to offer as a peace offering to his little goddaughter and, more importantly, her mother who was still huffing about him forgetting the holiday entirely last year. “I sent you a letter,” he mocked beneath his breath, voice heavy with what must have been a horrible faux-Swedish accent as the wrapping paper continued to crinkle loudly and do exactly everything except what he needed it to do. “Cannae even be bothered to check your damn mail--”

The complains continued, and the source of his frustration was immediately clear: wrapping gifts was yet another talent other people had that he certainly did not. Surrounded by obnoxiously-colored paper, more tape than could ever be construed as necessary, and balled up bits of trash, it had taken Moody the better part of an hour and several drags off the bottle at his side to wrap the first two, two handsome books he was sure Jan would love. The last gift-- a stuffed sheep about the size of the two year old herself-- was a far more difficult task to tackle than the predictably-shaped books. So far, he'd somewhat and somehow gotten a ring of paper around its neck, and was seriously considering giving up and jamming a bow on its head when a knock sounded at his door. He nearly knocked over his bottle, startled as he was, and grabbed it just in time to cast wide eyes toward the entrance. Och shit don't tell me I missed it again and she's come to yell at me--

Cautious and hoping the fear would sober him up, (hell hath no fury and all,) Alastor carefully screwed the lid back onto the bottle before hiding it just behind his couch. Using every ounce of that stealth training that had been offered to him a decade ago, which perhaps might have been more effective had he been keeping track of how much whisky he'd downed, he skulked toward the door, taking the opportunity to peek through the hole the moment it arose to gauge whatever intruder had come knocking.

Oh. He breathed a shaky sigh of relief, tension melting from his shoulders and allowing them to drop from the position near-about round his ears they'd taken up. Just Shacklebolt. Salazar only knew what the man wanted, but whatever it was, it was a far sight better than having an angry Swede on his doorstep. Undoing the locks-- a process that took a few moments even then-- whatever greeting he might have lobbed toward his brother died on his lips as he was assaulted both by a blast of shockingly cold air and an unnerving expression he hadn't seen before on the usually-stoic man's face.

His eyes fell to his feet, a sparkle of red having stood out quite plainly against the otherwise pure snow coating the ground. Years in the office allowed him to recognize blood immediately. Alastor stared at it for a long moment, noticing that it was slowly growing deeper, the heat and thickness of it eating through the snow before the cold ultimately conquered it, and appeared to be originating from the briefcase Kingsley had always preferred. Oh. Casually, he leaned against his door frame, attention rising back to his brother's face. His voice reflected his posture.