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twenty-seven // my mother is a functioning alcoholic
summer, 1994!
𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 𝐏𝐀𝐋𝐄, 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓'𝐒 𝐒𝐀𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆, because they're always pale, all of them— House of Black's witches and wizards, that is, but now it's as if something sucked out whatever little colour Sirius Black held on his features.
The sun's awfully bright today, Black notices. Vibrant, eye-watering. Lambent beams haze through lunettes, casting the pastel walls in a crescent shape, almost like a slice of citrus. Outside the blinding glow, is an infinite blue horizon. Like an expansive ocean, and the clouds, mimicking all sorts of odd shapes, are the mystical sea life. He doesn't admire the ocean anymore, he shared with Chiara last week on a particularly rainy summer night, as she too admitted she finds the world too crude for her praise, no longer finding beauty in the ladybugs sitting on her lily-white skin and the sea-shells sticking out of sand on the beach.
"You cannot be serious," Sirius gapes, eyes wide like a deer's and enough to fall right out of his sockets, which they would if there were any more hollowness in that boney face of his from starving himself at Grimmauld's Place. "He has to be in Azkaban, he must be!"
"I went to Crouch's house, to pester him about an upcoming vote," Everest starts. "And— Sirius, I swear I heard Barty's voice at some point! It was faint, but— it's Barty! I'd recognise him everywhere."
Sirius would dismiss anyone saying something so outlandish, but he would never dismiss Everest.
Apparently, Crouch Senior is not as law abiding as they all assumed. Even though Crouch defended his son, as he was scoffing loudly at the late Abraxas Malfoy and Cygnus Black for defending their own. Crouch, somehow, got his son out of Azkaban, all hush-hush.
"If we get him," Sirius warns. "Not only would we lose valuable blackmail material, but I am positive Barty would go... looking for a certain someone."
"Will you shut up about the blackmail?" she groans, exhaling smoke into the cool air. They're sprawled out in the garden, cigarette tips glowing in the dark, Sirius wrapped in one of Everest's robes like some disgruntled king, a bottle of cheap beer dangling from his fingers.
"He's a bloody Death Eater," Sirius scoffs. "I say we leave him to rot."
Everest turns her head, watching him through the haze of smoke. "If James was trapped somewhere, kept captive, would you leave him there?"
