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

[mad_actually]

Comments

[fleasaremurder]

*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

[mad_actually]

*The wards ripple with an oscillating, gentle sort of resistance, as if a skipping stone has been tossed across its surface sending out ever-widening circles of force and movement. Beyond it, there's a very sudden and pressing absence. A darkness that causes the house to curl inwards like a dead moth, all husk-like brownness and folded, dusty wings. The lights are gone. In its place there's a new rippling. Something freshly emerged and only-just-noticed. Without weight and contour and shadow it sits on the front steps, too far off to make out its bright yet hazy details.*

[fleasaremurder]

*Sirius doesn't notice. He's unpacked tools--his wand, an sextant, a pad and muggle ballpoint pen to calculate on, a small and well-worn handbook of useful charts--and now he sits, crosslegged, scribbling, looking at the sextant, adjusting it, and then flipping through the book. He hasn't even picked up his wand yet. The process of hacking a hole through a complex ward, Sirius has found, looks impressive and elegantly simple if you ignore the lengthy process of calculations, double-checks, and measurements that have to be taken beforehand.*

[mad_actually]

*It's a downward pressing, a vaguely migrating heavy chill that lends everything an implacable sense of urgency. That steady, muffled uneasiness that only comes from exceptionally still and silent places. Even the bugs are gone - crickets and beetles and daddy-long-legs conspicuously absent from the parched grass.*