#amycusc

There’s a gaggle of younger kids in all their finery, resisting (for the most part) the urge to fling themselves headfirst into the snow that the twins wander out into, a careless disregard for the cold that comes with the mutual agreement to leave Molly and Arthur to their canoodling in corners (just this once) and they’re entirely too busy laughing over their score, jokes roaring thick and fast through the frozen air, to notice they’ve picked up a shadow.

It’s two hours later, when even the heat of Firewhiskey can’t drive back the cold and they’ve created crop circles out of the neighbours fields that they find him, a half-frozen, teeth-chattering seven year old whose hands and lips are already blue with the cold. There’s defiance written in his small face, in the set of pale eyes that unapologetically refuses to tell either of them why he’d followed them out into the storm.

Fabian grumbles about Carrows as Gideon crowds in, knocking the powder from small shoulders and crouching before him, snow melting through the knees of his uncomfortable robes and a wide, wild smile on his face that says ‘Watch this’ as he cups small hands in his own and turns them, palm up, to cup the sudden bloom of fire. It flickers, reflected in wide pale eyes, as colour blooms in the apples of the boy’s cheeks and the tip of his nose, and Gideon winks as he rocks back on his heels, pushing back to his feet. 

“To keep you warm.”

–

It’s a dark alley and he’s the definition of a bad idea; a refugee spat out of the billowing smoke and heat of battle, half drunk on the taste of his own blood forged like iron on his tongue and the direct shot of adrenaline that rattles his bones, rushing through his veins like he’s forgotten what fear felt like, what it sounds like, ringing in his ears. He’s a kite with it’s strings cut, battered by the changing winds and waiting for the fall, but there’s a liberation to an untethered existence (if liberation feels like suspended freefall.)

Clever, collected Gideon is a shadow, a whisper in his ear of a person who used to be, it’s instinct and armour that charts his course now. Do you see this, brother? This is the beast that war made; soot and sweat and blood and ash. 

Outside his shelter, a makeshift haven of crumbling brick, Diagon Alley is afire; the afternoon torn open with a blaze of curses that sing through the air from one, two, three sides (and not a single one among them to trust.) There are spiderwebs of cracks in the columns of Gringotts, white marble spilling across the cobblestones like a children’s game amidst the blood and the fallen and the crackle and pop of flames that hungrily devour the Apothecary two doors down (billowing flames that cloud the air, toxic and thick and combustible, that cling to the back of his throat as he stumbles hard, out of the path of a curse, orange and hissing in his ear).

Laughter and screaming and crying collide and combine in his ears, lost to the roar of the fire and the crumble of buildings, but this, this is the noise he hears; choked, wet — the snuffling, panicked gasps of a wounded animal. There’s blood on the soles of his boots, a dark, wet trail that slithers into the shadows at the back of his alleyway. It’s a black cloak and a discarded mask that cracks beneath the heel of his boot, a bone-white gleam ground into the dirt and the dark blood that pools outwards from the scrambling creature that’s painstakingly dragged itself out of the line of fire.

Amycus Carrow is a predator even now; bloody teeth bared in a snarl as his fingers dig deep into the wound that tears through his side, shaking hands smeared dark and wet with the blood he’s desperately trying to hold in. He’s a study in survival; clawing every painstaking inch of his way to some semblance of safety, and he can see the fear and defiance and rage burning behind pale eyes, rolled up to find him like he’s Death himself, panting like he might just find the breath to spit blood back at him; ask him what the fuck he’s looking at, but the truth pulses between his fingers, in the ragged, gasping breaths, IwanttoliveIwanttoliveIwantto—

It would be so easy. Gideon can see it in clammy pale skin and the vacancy sign that clouds pale eyes; it’s in the blood that slips freely between his fingers and blooms at the corners of his lips. Cursed, it said, as if that brutal kind of magic weren’t obvious in the greying tinge of his skin, the panic written in his eyes. A wand has fallen bloody at Amycus’s side. Gideon wouldn’t even have to touch him, he could just—

Leave? Walk away. There are others just like him lining the streets and crying for help, their hands clean, deserving of his time in their ticking clocks. How many notches on Carrow’s tally? How many? What has he done behind the security of a mask? It would be so easy. 

Amycus isn’t asking to be saved.

Nobody would know.

“What are you—”

— Waiting for?

There’s a square-jawed hero still buried somewhere in Gideon’s chest and Amycus isn’t the monster at the end of this story. (Survival is the cruellest fate he knows.)

Instead there’s blood seeping in through the knees of his pants, slick against the hard, biting cold of worn cobblestones and he crowds in until he can feel the ragged, shallow breaths expelled across his skin. There’s an intimacy to that stuttered breath between life and death and Gideon’s hands are built to break — they’re wide and large, fracture lines of tiny silver scars marring the pads of his fingers and palms from curses that had bitten back — his hands are tough and clever things, resourceful and quick, but they were never meant to heal.

Improvisation is his specialty.

“What are—”

There’s something manic in the bared teeth of his smile, in the brightness of his eyes that said death just might be kinder, his voice a foreign thing, conversational above the rasp that smoke has given it. “This is going to hurt.”

Flesh sears in the path of his wand, acrid smoke that burns through the curse that keeps his blood running, thin and pumping vigorously out of his body, and Amycus is gagging, choking, howling — fingers clawing into his arms like it might stop the fire but this is his gift; this is what survival looks like, this is what life feels like.