After.
Somehow, he's back to the same place he started. He's back in his father's house. He's back in the one place he swore he would never step foot in again.
He doesn't remember it being so dull. Although, to be fair, he can't remember much of anything. He doesn't remember how long he's been here. He doesn't remember the last day he woke up, but he does remember he was here, sitting with his legs crossed on his huge bed surrounded by pillows and blankets and just sitting on top of the comforter, staring at the wall as he tries to make sense of his surroundings.
It's like he's underwater. Like his lungs and his brain are full of water and he can only come back to himself once he manages to pull his head up above water for just long enough to take a breath of air. Even then, taking a breath of air doesn't do anything to expel the water already clogging his body. It just pushes another thing into his body that it can't handle. And then he goes under again and he wakes up in the same spot and in the same place but somehow in a completely different reality. Like his mind just disconnects farther from his brain.
If his mother was here, she'd be sitting with him. She would come in and sit next to him, and he'd lay his head in her lap and she'd hum a song as he closes his eyes and breaths her in. She smells like roses. She's not around anymore though. She's dead. She died because of him. Not really. He doesn't know exactly how she died. It was explained to him, but he can't understand how the whole thing happened. He doesn't care. He just wishes she was here with him now, for her to do nothing more than to just exist alongside him.
Instead, he's a ghost in his own house. If not covered by his father's invisibility cloak, he's under the Imperius Curse. That is, if he's ever made to leave his room. If it was his choice, he'd just stay rotting away over his perfectly white sheets for the rest of his life. Not that he has much of a life anyway. That faded long before the oblivious charm.
He doesn't know how long he was in Azkaban. He knows he was there. The damage done to his soul transcends memory. It's chipped away pieces of his very being, seeped so deeply into his mind that it's the first thing that he remembers when he enters a state of lucidity.
He knows the years are passing. That's what they do. Time will pass no matter what he does, it's only a matter of how present he is for it.
Sometimes they're as short of him waking up for a minute, just in time for him to witness a house elf to cut his hair, and he's gone the next minute. He doesn't know why he remembers that specifically. Other times, he wakes up and he waits for his mind to run away from him again, and it doesn't. And then he's forced to slowly have his life come back to him, every single beautifully painful moment that leaves him a weeping mess until his father eventually stomps up the stairs and puts him back under the Imperius. Then he's left to cry in a smaller corner of his mind until it shrinks to the point where he's faded again.
Where was he?
He wasn't awake when the Mark started burning. Maybe that was for the best. All he knows was that the Dark Lord came and rescued him, in some way or another, and he's been going on missions again. Killing and burning and destroying whatever he touches. Just like he used to. It's comfortable, stable even. The morality behind it all has ceased to register. He doesn't know where he goes when his mind disappears. He knows that he acts as he normally does; to anyone else, there'd be nothing different about him except for the attention behind his eyes. No one says anything though. He does what he's supposed to, and that's enough.
He's awake now. He's sure of it. Because if he wasn't awake, he wouldn't feel such a sharp pain at the name that comes out of the Dark Lord's lips during their next briefing.
Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody.
Because if he wasn't awake, he wouldn't remember Evan.
Regulus once described James Potter as the sun. It was a distinct memory of his, one of the few from Hogwarts. He had taken one of Regulus' journals and was reading through it, mainly for the thrill that would come after Regulus discovered he was reading it. And in it, he had written the words as simple as they were. James is the sun. He had stared at the line and thought that it was strange that Regulus would describe anyone in such a way, then immediately reasoned that if Regulus were to call anyone anything like that, it would be a metaphor relating to astronomy. Then he thought that if James Potter was the sun, and Regulus was the stars, then Evan was the ocean. The reason that life exists, the reason that any of them can live and breathe and think and love as they do.
Moody had been the one to fire the arc of green lightning. He had been the one to dry the seas and deprive the earth of something so fundamentally necessary for survival.
Something so fundamentally necessary for his survival. And now... he's slowly dying without him.
Moody. Right, Moody. The man had ended up in a box. It was easy to do, actually, considering the reputation that followed him. Funnily enough, the only other person that helped capture him was Peter Pettigrew. He hadn't known the boy before that moment when the two of them met, when the Dark Lord assigned Pettigrew to help him with this, and he doesn't remember much about the boy--although he's more of a man now; they aren't in Hogwarts anymore--except for an insatiable need for validation flickering behind his eyes as they went; it's nothing too uncommon to see these days.
They tied him up and put him in a box. He laughed through the entire thing. Evan would have probably laughed at it too. Somewhere along the way he started crying. Pettigrew didn't say anything. He never did. But as they yanked his hair out and switched his clothes around, he couldn't help but fantasize about sticking his wand straight through the man's working eye. He was forced to settle with the Cruciatus.
It's weird to be back at Hogwarts alone. The last time he was here, he was still whole. He had Evan and Regulus, and a dorm they all had to sleep in. Pandora would be around then too, and if you were to go back another year or so, then so would Dorcas. He remembers Dorcas the least. Maybe that's at fault of the dementors; it's been said that they target one's happiest memories. He may love Evan, but Dorcas was there. And now they're not.
He's getting off track again. Hogwarts. He arrives as Moody. He knows none of the people at the tables. It's disorienting, to say the least. He used to be able to walk into that room three times a day and be able to name at least a dozen people at any given time. He talked to people. He knew people. He doesn't talk to people anymore. Nobody knows him either.
He's here for the Dark Lord. He knows that much. For a boy, Harry Potter--funnily enough--and to get him into the Triwizard Tournament. It's an honor to have been chosen for it in the first place, and he will not, be any means, fuck it up. He can't fucking someone else up.
He looks across the tables of red and green and blue and yellow and he listens to Dumbledore introduce him, and then he's off again to find his classroom. His memories of Hogwarts aren't the sharpest; he almost turns towards the dungeons after dinner is over out of instinct. When classes begin, and therefore teaching begins, he's surprised to discover that he doesn't hate it. Not in the slightest. He wouldn't ever have thought of it as a career, but after his first class he went to sleep thinking-
-he blinks and the world snaps back into focus again. He blinks again and he remembers where he is. He doesn't know the date or the time or the month or the name of the girl standing in front of him that's staring at him. He's holding a stack of parchment. There's an ink stain on the table next to him.
"Professor Moody?"
He looks at her. His mouth falls open slightly. "Evan?"
She tilts her head slightly to the side. "Who's that?"
Not Evan. He passes a hand through the air in dismissal. "Nothing. What do you need?"
She places her paper down in front of him. "I have a question about dementors."
He twists her paper around. He doesn't remember teaching this in the slightest. He glances back up at her face again. Not Evan. Definitely not Evan, but there's just something...
"I don't quite understand the dementor's kiss." She points at a line in the passage. Her skin is darker, but not as dark as Evan's. Her hair is blonde the same way, though. And the shape of her nose, it reminds him of something.
"What's your name, again?"
"Luna Lovegood, sir."
Lovegood. He doesn't remember a Lovegood. They stare at each other for a second, unblinking.
"Dementor's kiss. What about it?"
"Well, I get how it works. But..." she tilts her head again. "What exactly does it do?"
He kisses his teeth. "They do what they do best. Rip one's soul right out of their body. The Kiss is a process of actually removing the soul, leaving the person in a vegetative state. They're technically living, but they aren't really live. A shell of a person."
"What happens to the soul?"
He smiles. "It's destroyed. Poof. Gone."
She frowns. "Oh, well, that's sad." She picks up her papers and straightens them against the desk. "That's all I needed. Thank you, Professor."
He leans back in his chair, his eyes flickering around the room and trying to get a grasp of what day it is. He remembers more now than when he usually wakes up. He smiles in satisfaction at the thought.
"Sir?"
His eyes flicker back to the door. "Yes, Miss. Lovegood?"
She pauses. "Why did you call me Evan?" Her white curly hair is up in a bun, her wand stuck straight through it.
"No reason. Now go to your next class."
She closes the good with a small "thank you".
And then he's gone again.
He comes back to himself in a haze. He's looking over a maze. A large, green maze. There are people--children, mostly--screaming around him. He doesn't know who he is.
It's coming back to him. Slowly.
As always, the dementors come first, the flashes of his time in Azkaban. Then Evan comes, washing away those. And then Dorcas and Regulus and Pandora, too, and then what happened and--wait what is he doing here? He blinks. Right. Harry Potter.
He doesn't remember what he did to get here. There's something in the back of his mind telling him that within that maze somewhere is the boy himself, and that the Dark Lord is waiting for him. The Mark on his left arm is slowly warming.
The Dark Lord is the only thing he has left to ching on to. It doesn't require that much attention; you just do what you're told and then you're rewarded for it. And when he can't even remember doing anything, then it's almost like a dream. Everything's like a dream. A nightmare. What's the difference? All that matters is that he still has a purpose. And that somewhere out there in that maze, his purpose is coming back to life.
And then he blinks and he's inside. There's a boy sitting in front of him, against the wall, his green eyes wide and his face covered in a sheen of sweat and dirt. His wand is raised. He doesn't know what he's doing, but he's happily to follow through with the spell already on the tip of his lips. He recognizes him, of course he does. Harry Potter.
Then there's a sudden bang and his head is hitting the wall. The grounds tilts under his feet. He's in a chair. Why is he in a chair? He tries to pick his head up and it's pushed right back down. There's a hand around his neck, forcing his mouth open. His tongue instinctively flicks out towards it. God, how his father hated it when he did that.
The man holding his neck--fucking Dumbledore-says something he can't make out, and another figure comes forwards by a step and shoves something down his throat. He chokes on the liquid, his head instinctively trashing as he tries to swallow it. Some of it drips down the side of his mouth.
Dumbledore shakes his collar. "Do you know who I am?"
"Albus Dumbledore," he says, spitting the words out as if they're poison. He's always despised the man. Dumbledore shakes his collar ag-
-cold. It's cold.
He shifts, grimacing at the shakes around his wrists. "What-" He pulls on them, and when that doesn't work, throws his hands down in defeat. He hits the back of his head against the wall, much harder than he intended it to, wincing once the pain hits.
He doesn't consider himself to be insane. He's not insane. He's fully within his own mind. It's just that sometimes he gets a bit lost.
He screams, if only to let rage stream out of his body. He was so close. He was so close. "FUCK."
It's not his fault.
He hits his head against the wall again, this time purposely hard. He wants to leave. He wants out. He just wants to go to sleep again. He failed. He failed again. He killed everyone, and now the one time he was actually supposed to-
Every muscle in his body simultaneously tenses. It's an instinct. A habit he thought he had no use for anymore. "No. No. NO." His eyes are frozen to the door. "DON'T FUCKING DO THIS TO ME. DON'T-NO. No. No no no no no no no-" he screams again, hot tears streaming down his face. "GET ME OUT OF HERE. MAKE IT STOP."
The door opens. It's back. It's back. It's-
"You really should study, Barty."
"Evan, when have I ever needed to study for charms."
A piece of paper lands on his forehead. "Fuck off."
The air temperature drops. He knocks his head against the wall again. Harder.
"Are you serious?"
Dorcas bites their lower lip, then groans and falls backward onto their bed. "Fuck me."
"Sounds like that's what you want McKinnon to do."
"You fucking-"
There's a faint creak outside the door.
"It's destroyed. Poof. Gone."
"Oh, well, that's sad.
It creaks open. He knows what's coming. He knows. He knows.
"Why did you call me Evan?"
"No reason. Now go to sleep."
A black hand wraps around the door. Tendrils of frost spike from its fingertips, across the metal. His stomach drops.
"Do you want kids?"
He looks over at her by the window. "I don't know. I think I'd kill them by accident."
Pandora grins. "Nah, I think you'd be great." She sits up straight. "I want a kid."
He raises a brow and smiles. "As long as you made me the godfather."
She laughs loudly. "I think Regulus would kill me if he wasn't first. You and Evan can have my second kid."
He sticks his hand out. "Sounds like a deal."
She shakes her head but takes his hand anyway.
Pandora.
The dementor's head slinks into the room. It's just one, yet it's so unbelievably there.
She's Pandora's daughter.
It leans forward, its head tilting just slightly to the right. Barty tries to hide his face as best as he can. "HELP ME."
She's Regulus' goddaughter.
Its hand touches his arm, and he screams at the cold burning sensation that cuts through the nerves.
She's Evan's niece.
It touches its other hand to Barty's cheek, and he screams again. But now he's crying.
Barty. That's his name. Barty. Barty. He didn't-
He didn't remember it.
It forces his head right, although it doesn't have to do much to move it.
He's tired. He's so, so tired.
His eyes are screwed shut, but it doesn't matter. He can feel the dementor's presence so well that it's almost as if it's projected onto his eyelids. "Please stop. Please-"
and then it starts. it's like his air supply is being cut off. he can feel it. he can feel as it's sucking his soul out of his body. he doesn't- it doesn't.
why is it-
evan please help me, please, please make it stop
evan please help me, make it
evan please help, stop
evan please
evan
eva
ev
e
.