Chapter Text
A Man who Saw Too Much
Alastor Moody — the name out of legend, the man who had filled half of Azkaban, who had outlasted three Ministers, who had held his shoulder steady for dying comrades, who had seen it all and lived to tell of it — was nothing special. He believed himself an average wizard. The one thing he possessed that no other did was his vigilance, and the drive to do the right thing in spite of his emotions, in spite of the situation. He could easily have killed some of the worst of them — murderers, rapists, psychopaths — and not a soul would have asked a question. But he stayed true to his nature and captured them, bound them, and walked them living through the gates instead. He was no sage. He felt giddy as a first-year putting some new Auror recruit who fancied himself Merlin reincarnate firmly back in his place. He felt absolutely heavenly when some reporter, only doing his job, stumbled three steps back from the absolute, glaring stare that x-rayed the hell out of him. Yes — those were a few of the small entertainments he filled his days with.
But he knew he was no god, to dish out whatever he pleased to whomever he judged to be in the wrong. Because he knew that the moment he crossed that line, there would be no line left at all — no boundary, nothing to hold him. He would be no better than the scum he had buried behind those wretched walls of darkness.
There was, though, one thing that could still make his old blood boil. He could not bear to see one of his own put in the ground, and he despised the monsters who managed it. Each of them was like a child to him. He had made them endure the worst of what could generously be called training. They were broken and built back piece by piece, and then put to the fire again and again, until they had each been hammered into an unwavering shape. Linton Harper. Rudolph Davis. Amelia Bones. Kingsley Shacklebolt. Frank Longbottom. Alice Longbottom. Sirius Black. James Potter. And, lately, young Sammy Brown. Some he had buried with his own hands. Some had surpassed him and now outranked him. Some had left. Some were still grinding. But every last one of them would always be his. He would step in front of any curse for them, lose whatever was left of him to lose for them, and call it a fair trade — because that was who he was. He was Alastor to the ones who had known him before the scars took over his face, and Mad-Eye to the new blood, and to those who set themselves against the law he was a wall that would not move until not one brick of him remained standing.
One among the many of his creations stood in front of him now, filling out a most unusual form.
The Animagus discipline was not one many wizards put their time into. But Sirius Black had never been a usual wizard. He was cocky — yes. He was, undeniably, an idiot — yes. But he had a heart of pure white, no matter what his surname suggested, and Moody had known it from the moment he got past the boy's carefully crafted, witty outer skin and dug down to what lay beneath. This was a boy who, during one particularly vicious Death Eater raid, had thrown himself into the path of a Cruciatus meant for a small child and borne it without so much as a cry. A growing man who could have put down a werewolf in the middle of a massacre and chose instead to wrap it in chains. And now a man who had decided to fight those same fiends in the grand circus hall itself — even if he loathed every droning hour of debate over flying-carpet regulations — because he believed the world could be made better, and was stubborn enough to try.
He had fought them head to head for almost four years now, tearing down any regulation that was inhumane. He had fought the bills that wanted the Auror budget gutted the moment peace was declared. He had fought the likes of the Rosiers, the Notts, the Malfoys, the Parkinsons, who clawed tooth and nail to smear his name across every paper in print — and he had not broken. He had not so much as bent. He had lost some of those battles and won others, but he had never once backed down, shied away, or flinched.
One of his own, Moody thought, with no small pride.
"Here, sir. It's filled up now." The voice pulled him out of his thinking, and there stood the man himself.
"A dog, eh." Moody smirked, his good eye dropping to the parchment while the other went on rolling. "Now I wonder — all those tracking missions. How you ever managed to be so damned accurate."
Black kept his face perfectly blank. "I have no idea what you're droning on about, Sir."
He barked a laugh. "Aye, lad. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"
The man did not jump. Did not so much as twitch — well. His ears twitched, just once, and Moody marked it and was satisfied: a seasoned survivor now, this one. He feared no one and showed nothing, not the way he used to wear it all on his sleeve, a lifetime ago.
"Still tormenting the poor things fresh out of Hogwarts, I see," Black said, and this time Moody could tell the smile was genuine.
A Black. Who would ever have guessed it would be this one to carry the mantle the rest of that family had been so proud of — and turn it clean around. He noticed, too, that the boy had stepped neatly past his line of enquiry and steered the talk toward something he could be passionate about instead. He let it slide. This time.
"Aye. Someone's got to bash the point through those thick skulls." He said it almost proudly. Then he tapped the parchment with one scarred finger. "Show me, then. The form. I've to confirm it matches your description before I put my name to anything."
For a moment Black only looked at him. Then he stepped back from the desk, and between one breath and the next the man was simply gone.
In his place sat a great black dog — shaggy, heavy through the shoulders, ribs like a wolfhound gone half to shadow, and a pair of pale, knowing eyes that had not changed in the slightest. The eyes were the same sharp grey he knew and understood well.
Moody leaned in. His magical eye spun once around the shape of it, snout to tail, and what it found agreed with every word written on the form. Genuine. Stable. No trace of a botched transformation, no half-thing trapped between forms. Clean and practiced execution, his gut told him, far older than the date inked in that careful, lying hand at the top of the page — old as the war, old as those impossible tracking results that had no business being so precise. He had known that the moment the man walked in.
But the form did not ask Alastor Moody when the trick had first been learned. It asked only whether the beast in front of him matched the registration — and it did. So he could put his name to that much and not a word of a lie would touch it. The rest was Lord Black's lookout, and Lord Black's risk to carry.
He held the dog's gaze a breath longer. Thought, despite himself, of a boy taking a curse meant for a child and making no sound at all.
Then he dipped his quill and signed.
"That'll do," he said, as the man folded back up out of the dog. "Lord Black."
Sirius nodded, indulgent, and for once let that old mischievous, idiotic grin spread across his face. "It's always Sirius to you, Mad-Eye." And without skipping a beat he turned on his heel and was out the door before Moody could get a single word in edgewise.
He chuckled despite himself. It was a running joke between him and that miscreant James Potter — the pair of them would insist on the last word even when it earned them a grueling impromptu dueling session for the trouble. He always put them back in their place for it, never with words but with a few well-placed stinging hexes and a dangling one or two left to twist. Sentimental fools, the both of them. Worth more than half the department all the same.
Shaking his head and grumbling about "getting soft in his old age," he turned back to the case waiting on his desk. A dozen illegal Portkey arrivals into Britain, all of them out of somewhere in mainland Europe, none of them through any sanctioned point of entry. He needed to get to the bottom of it.
He read the file through until he could have recited it word for word, then heaved himself up and stepped out into the bullpen, where he set his eye on an unsuspecting Auror staggering past under a mountain of case files.
"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"
The man jumped so badly his wand shot straight up out of his hand and the parchments went everywhere, scattering across the floor like dried leaves caught in a tornado. Once the snickering around the office had run its course, the Auror came to his senses, snatched his wand off the ground, and glared.
Moody simply raised an eyebrow. "What happens when some scum slips into this office and curses you, eh? Were you planning to throw crumpled parchment in his face?"
The object of his ire couldn't decide whether to land on embarrassment or anger, and ended up stranded somewhere between the two, mouth working with nothing coming out.
He narrowed his eyes and said, sweetly — or what he reckoned passed for sweetly, though judging by the flinches around the room it had landed nothing of the sort — "Not a man of many words, eh? Then I hope your wand talks better than your mouth does." He turned, and let the rest carry over his shoulder. "The Garden. Ten minutes."
The Garden was office shorthand for the training arenas down below, where the true Aurors were ground out of raw recruits. Still muttering about falling standards and the sorry state of the new blood, Moody walked the length of the floor and rapped twice on Amelia's door.
At the sound of "come in," he entered to find her with Frank, the two of them bent over a stack of reports.
Frank glanced up, calm as ever. "Who was it this time?"
"Dunno. Don't much care, long as he takes the lesson." Frank's lip twitched, but he didn't press. He knew better — Moody had taught him better.
"What is it this time, Alastor?" Amelia asked, in that long-suffering tone she'd taken to using with him a great deal lately, for reasons he genuinely couldn't fathom.
"I'll need a permit to have a few of these Portkeys sent down to the Unspeakables for inspection. And to trace their points of origin."
"Is this the business with the Muggle who watched people materialise out of thin air?" she said, already drawing a form out of her desk.
"Aye. And someone used a dingy old metal rod for the Portkey. The metal analysis puts it at a decade old, at the least." He set his knuckles on the edge of her desk. "I need a point of origin before I can go to the right authorities abroad and get a clearer picture of who, exactly, we're dealing with."
Amelia's quill paused for half a breath, then resumed. She filled the permit out without further comment and slid it across to him. He took it, grunted something that might generously have been called thanks, and left them to their reports.
By the time he reached the Garden, his ten minutes were nearly spent.
It was empty but for one man. Dawlish stood near the middle of the scarred stone floor, wand already drawn, jaw set somewhere between a sulk and outright defiance. Good. Anger, Moody could work with. Anger was a thing a man dragged into a fight whether he meant to or not, and the sooner this one learned exactly what it cost him, the longer he was like to live.
He didn't bother with a greeting. He flicked his wand, and the first stinging hex caught Dawlish across the knuckles before the boy had finished squaring up. Dawlish yelped, snapped his wand up, and threw a hasty Stunner back — too high, too rushed, telegraphed from the shoulder a mile off. Moody drifted out of its path without seeming to move at all, and answered with two more stings, one to the thigh and one to the ear, each landing precisely where the boy wasn't guarding.
"Sloppy. Slow. And you're aiming where I was, not where I am," he said, and advanced.
That did it. Dawlish's face went a blotchy red and he came back with a furious flurry, hex on hex, overpowered and wild — the wand-work of a man who had stopped thinking and started feeling. Moody turned the lot aside almost lazily, one on a shield, two more simply stepped around, and when a particularly vicious cutter sailed wide and took a chunk out of the far wall, he allowed himself a grin.
"There it is," he growled, almost fond. "Feel that? That's your temper spending your aim for you. A real enemy will thank you for the gift."
He pressed in then, in earnest, and the stings came in a steady, merciless rhythm — wrist, shoulder, the soft hollow behind the knee — quicker than the boy could track or turn aside. Dawlish deflected two on pure instinct and got off one half-decent return that Moody actually had to mean to avoid, and for that single shot something glinted in the old man's eye that, on a kinder face, might have passed for approval. Then a sting cracked across the back of his wand-hand, and his fingers sprang open of their own accord. The wand clattered away across the stone. Dawlish went down after it and stayed there, curled on the cold floor, chest heaving, welts rising hot beneath his robes.
Moody stood over him and let the quiet finish what the hexes had started.
"Next time I catch you idling with your guard down," he said, and there was no real cruelty left in it, "I'll take it to mean you learned nothing here today. Don't make me right." He turned for the door. "On your feet, Dawlish. Ice those welts. Same time tomorrow."
Was he harsh? Maybe he was. Was he bullying a man below his own station? Maybe that too. Did he regret a second of it? Not in the slightest. One day a curse would come for that boy out of a doorway he'd forgotten to check, and some buried scrap of this — the sting, the shame, the flinch beaten down into habit — might be the one thing that turned his head in time to live. That was why he had turned down every promotion they'd ever dangled in front of him, why he had never once let them bolt him behind a desk like the rest of his old class. This — the Garden, the sweat, the slow brutal work of making someone harder to kill — this was the best and most important part of being an Auror.
He walked to the lift and pressed for Level Nine. The car was empty but for some junior secretary, and he snorted at the stack of campaign fliers clutched to her chest.
The British wizarding world was bubbling over with election fever, and there had been ample drama already. Three candidates had put themselves forward. There was Honoria Mostyn, a coward who fancied she could deliver "great reforms." There was Aldous Yaxley, who meant to restore "prestige to the old blood." And there was that polished bowling ball out of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, Cornelius Fudge, who promised to usher in "a peaceful world." Every last one of them made a sorry excuse for a Minister, if anyone cared to ask him — and no one ever did.
Sirius, Augusta, and Dumbledore's lot were rooting for Mostyn, on account of her principles. Principles — bah. As though she'd shown a scrap of them, running the way she had when the war came knocking. The Death Eaters he so despised for walking free had thrown in behind Yaxley — whose own nephew was rotting in Azkaban this very moment, thanks to Moody himself. He grinned, wide and wicked, at the memory of that particular collar, and the girl in the corner edged a good step further away, eyes gone round as Galleons. And Fudge was well enough liked across a fair number of families, for the simple reason that he bent whichever way the wind and the gold were blowing, and would prop up anyone at all so long as it served Cornelius Fudge.
So who would win was anyone's guess. But Moody knew how it would go the moment the guessing stopped and the real trouble started — some fresh young lunatic deciding to start a riot, or to start killing for the sheer sadistic joy of it. One of the three would run and leave the big chair sitting empty. One, should the purebloods be the ones doing the killing, would more likely send round his congratulations. And one would try to bury the whole bloody business and broker a peace where no peace had any business being brokered.
Well. As long as the Aurors kept coming, he would keep doing his job. And the day they decided he was too battered to be worth the trouble — that would be the day he saw himself off into a "peaceful retirement," on his own terms and no one else's. His work was catching scum, and crafting the ones who would go on catching it after him. It was not standing about pointing out to every soul in the building that they were idiots.
The doors slid open on Level Five and the girl all but fled, heaving a sigh of pure relief the instant her shoes touched the corridor. Moody's mouth twitched. A few floors more and the lift settled at Level Nine, and he made his way toward the main door of the Unspeakables' office.
Inside, a Croaker sat with his pipe going and a newspaper held up before him, boots crossed at the ankle on the desk, looking for all the world like a man enjoying the finest afternoon of his life. He glanced up, folded the paper away, and smiled pleasantly.
"Ah, Alastor. Lovely weather we're having. Come to pay an old man a visit, have you?"
"I don't see how you find this dingy hole such a lovely place. And no — I haven't come to marvel at the finer pleasures of life. I've got something you can do for me."
"Honestly, who actually works in this environment? Sit yourself down. Take a back seat, enjoy the drama unfolding all around—" At Alastor's look, he sighed and flapped a hand: get on with it, then. Good decision, Moody thought privately, and handed the form across. The Croaker peered over it and wrinkled his nose.
"Set the thing on the table, would you. I've no desire to put my hands on that nasty old rod. If you'll excuse me." He said it with all the drama of a man asked to handle a week-dead fish.
"When can I have the results? It's bloody urgent."
"Oh, tomorrow's as good a day as any. Come round after eleven and it'll be waiting for you."
"My thanks. I'll leave you to your terribly important labours, then. Good day to you." He set the object — wrapped twice over in a plastic bag — down on the table as promised.
"Keep your guard up, old friend," the Croaker said, already half-distracted, eyeing the rod with distaste as he raised his wand to lift it.
"Always," Moody barked over his shoulder, and was gone.
On his way out he turned for the Atrium and sent up a summons for his current trainee. Brown could do with a lungful of fresh air and a bit of proper field work. In two months' time he'd be saddled with a new one, which meant there were a few lessons left to hammer in before this one was let loose on the scum alone. And so the cycle turned, the way it always did — waiting, watching, keeping half an eye on the comings and goings of a few hundred people living their ordinary little lives. Though there was an anticipation to the air today, a current running under everything, the way there always was before a vote.
"SIR." A voice from his left, pitched to catch him off his guard.
It didn't. The lad hadn't the faintest notion that Moody's eye had already swept over him three times on the walk across the floor.
He snorted. "It'll take you another lifetime to catch me unaware. Give it up, lad."
Brown rolled his eyes and fell into step, turning that expectant look on him. Moody started walking, certain he'd be followed without needing to say so.
"You've scrubbed up well," he said, with a glance at the boy's clean collar and combed hair. "Let's take a trip down Knockturn, then. See how that hair of yours fares down there."
A good lad, even if he spent a solid two hours a day brushing that dark hair, Moody thought, walking towards the Floo.
They came out of the Floo into the back room of the Leaky Cauldron, and Moody led the way through the bar and out into Diagon, the steady scrape-and-thud of his gait carving a path through the crowd. He let Brown gawp at the bustle for all of a minute before he steered them into a narrow gap between a robe shop and a shuttered stall, and the light changed.
Knockturn Alley always sat a few degrees colder than the street it hung off, like a cellar a man had wandered into by mistake.
"Right. First thing," Moody said, low. "Stop looking like a copper."
"I'm not—"
"You're walking like a man who has no fear in the world. Nobody down here walks like that but us and the ones who own the place. Keep your shoulders down, eyes moving, and head still. Make them feel you are cautious and wary. Make them come to you either to intimidate or flock together. That is how you gain trust and listen to things."
He let the boy stew on that, which was how they all learned best. "And he would make this boy..."
"Borgin's," he muttered after a short while walking in silence, tilting his chin at a grimy shopfront. "Here the dark sorts are sold and the darkest ones are bought. A favourite spot for smugglers and even some so-called ‘respectable’ families. We don't go in here without a reason that'll stand up after. And look at the apothecary two doors on, the one with the dead-looking window — that's where you go for the sort of ingredient that earns a man six months in a cell. Watch the doorways, not the doors. People who matter linger in doorways."
Brown's eyes flicked, far too fast, to a hunched figure loitering by that very apothecary. The figure clocked it on the instant and melted back into the dark.
"And that's how you lose a man before you've started following him," Moody said. "He's gone now. You spooked him. It cost us nothing today, because we weren't after him. Some other day it costs you everything."
He pushed into a pawnshop with a cracked window without knocking. A wisp of a man behind the counter looked up, saw who it was, and the welcome drained clean out of his face.
"Pike."
"Auror Moody." Pike set down the watch he'd been gutting. "I'm clean. Cleaner than clean. What do you want?"
"Course you are. Not why I'm here." Moody set a fist on the counter. "Anyone new through the Alley this past fortnight? Faces you'd not know. Folk keeping to themselves."
Pike's eyes did a small nervous dance. "There's always faces."
"Any new ones who jammed your doors? Apart from the usual faces?”
A pause, a shrug, the universal tongue of a man working out how little he could get away with. "Got a new pair yesterday, a prickly man and a woman who resembled and sounded like a hag. Asking about some stuff that went over my head. Barking mad the pair of them."
“So you turned them away? Sold nothing? Can't remember anything?” Moody pressed.
“Aye. They were drawing about some birds or something. Couldn't understand half of what they were saying. Asked to buy this piece here.” he said pointing to a red skull. “Gave some strange looking coins. Looked like something out of this place.”
"Foreign then?" He spoke more to himself than to Pike.
"Didn't ask. Never ask. You know how it works down here." Pike's mouth thinned. "Is that all?"
Moody held him under the eye a moment past comfortable, then straightened. "Keep your ears clean. I'll be back."
Out on the cobbles, Brown opened his mouth. Moody got there first. "Don't. Means nothing yet. Half this job is collecting nothings till the day they add up to a something. You'll write it down all the same."
They asked a few more places and gathered that "...this pair had been scouring the place..." in search of something. Although most of the shop owners apparently were not so helpful as Pike.Finally they were near the bottom of the Alley, where it forked off toward a row of lodging houses that rented rooms by the night and asked no names, when the door of the shabbiest one opened and two men stepped out.
Moody didn't stop or slow down. But every part of him that had kept him breathing for sixty-odd years came quietly awake.
It was nothing you could put a finger on. Two men came out in plain coats, nothing to mark them. They won't stand out in the crowd at all. But something was not quite right about them. One kept checking a pocket-watch with the clipped, anxious rhythm of a man counting against a clock — not waiting on someone, counting — and the other's face didn't sit right over the way he carried himself: an old man's heavy jowls above a young man's straight spine and a young man's quick, balanced step. Brown saw two blokes leaving a flophouse. Moody saw a face woven inside a mask, and a flask-shaped weight riding in a coat pocket, and a clock being run down to the minute. A sniff of something sterile was also present in the air.
Polyjuice, or his name wasn't worth the spit to say it.
He shifted his weight to turn, to get a clean look, to get close — and the pair of them, without a glance between them, without a word, turned on the spot and were gone. Two cracks, near enough together to land as one. No fumbling or backward look. Disciplined and Drilled.
Not the usual Knockturn vermin. The vermin never moved like that. The way this pair moved didn't match their faces and figures.
Moody stood a slow three-count, eye fixed on the empty stones where they'd been. Then he grunted, deep in his chest, and tipped it into the same dark drawer at the back of his skull as the foreign coin and the dozen decade-old rods and the Muggle who'd watched men drop out of thin air — all of it waiting in there with the rest of the nothings, on the off chance the day came they turned into a something.
"...Sir?" Brown had stopped, watching him.
"Nothing. Thought I knew a face." He started walking again. "Eyes front."
By the time they'd worked their way back up and out into the honest light of Diagon, the lamps were coming on and the sky over the rooftops had gone the colour of a healing bruise. Moody tapped his wand to his wrist, and the glowing figures of a Tempus told him the evening had got well away from the both of them.
"That'll do for today," he said. "Tomorrow you bring me five things you missed down there. And before you go looking pleased — there were more than five. Learn to identify them."
Brown groaned, which was the correct response. Moody jerked his head: go on, then. The lad went, off toward the Apparition point with the loose walk of someone who'd be aching in places he didn't yet know he owned come morning.
Moody waited until he was well clear. Old habit. Then he turned on his heel and let the world fold him home.
His cottage met him as it always did — wards humming a greeting that only he could hear, the gate latched, the path empty, everything precisely as paranoid as he'd left it.
Everything but the small, red-headed problem perched on his garden wall, heels drumming at the stone, who looked up at the crack of his arrival with the bright, untroubled certainty of a child who had decided — against all sense, and most of the available evidence — that Alastor Moody was his favourite person in all the world.
Moody's quiet evening died a swift and unmourned death.
"...Ronald," he growled.
The boy hopped down off his favourite wall, landing in a small puff of garden dust, and beamed up at him as though Moody had personally hung the moon and a fair few of the better stars besides.
"How long," Moody said, "were you sat up there?"
Ron gave the question honest thought. "Dunno. A bit."
"A bit. On an open wall, your back to the lane, swinging your legs like a flag run up a pole." He bent until the scarred half of his face was level with the boy's. "Anyone could have come up that path and had you before you thought to turn your head."
"You said your wards'd stop anyone getting in."
"And if a ward of mine fails one day, and you've gone and staked your neck on it holding — what then?"
Ron opened his mouth, found nothing in it worth saying, and closed it again. He was learning, slow as it was.
"Inside. Wash that muck off, hands and face both. Living room, ten minutes." Moody straightened with a grunt and a click of his bad knee. "And mind your boots. I'll not have half my garden walking across the floor."
The boy was already gone, charging up the path with all the stealth of a stampeding hippogriff. Moody watched him go and did not, under any circumstances, allow the corner of his mouth to move.
He went to change out of his work robes into something with fewer buckles and more give to it, and somewhere between one sleeve and the next he found himself thinking, as he did far too often these days, of the first afternoon the brat had landed on his doorstep.
It had been Arthur's doing. Arthur Weasley was his cousin through the man's mother's side, a connection Moody had spent the better part of forty years failing to shake. That day the parents had errands to run, the two eldest boys were away at Hogwarts, and the rest of the brood — the little girl, the twins, the prim middle one — had been packed off to Molly's aunt Muriel. Young Ronald had dug his heels in and announced, loudly and at length, that he would sooner be fed to a Blast-Ended Skrewt than spend an afternoon in that house.
So Arthur, seized by some misguided flash of inspiration and waving off every protest his wife could muster, had not asked Moody whether he might take the boy for the day. He had informed him. The owl read, in so many words, here is your afternoon, cousin, do try not to traumatise the lad. The sheer brass neck of the man.
Moody had been one day into one of the mandatory leave quotas the Ministry forced on him whenever some healer decided he had not slept enough, and he had not the first idea what a man like him was meant to do with a small, frightened child. The boy stood in his front room pale as a ghost, plainly certain he had been delivered somewhere to die. So Moody did the only thing he knew to do with a person standing about being useless: he put him to work. He handed the boy a stack of case files to carry from one chair to the next and, with nothing better to fill the quiet, talked the case through aloud as they went.
Somewhere in the middle of it the fear drained out of the boy's face, and he went quiet, and then curious, and then — Merlin help the both of them — useful. His notions were daft, most of them, the wild guesses of a child who had read too few of the right things and a great many of the wrong ones. But he threw them out all the same, eyes lit right up, leaning in over the files, and Moody saw the thing that kept him from sending the lad home early. Here was a child who, for the length of a single afternoon, was the only person in the room that anyone wanted to listen to.
He was the sixth of seven children, and never the first at anything — not the loudest nor the cleverest nor the funniest nor the eldest, always somewhere in the middle of the heap, shouting to be heard over five others doing it louder. And here sat a one-eyed old man with no patience at all for fools, hanging on his every half-formed thought as though it were worth its weight in gold.
After that the boy came whenever the chance arose, and Moody, though he would have bitten clean through his own tongue before admitting it where anyone could hear, found he did not mind it at all. He set the lad exercises and checked that he did them. He handed over a stack of Muggle detective novels, worth ten of the soft stuff wizarding children were raised on — Beedle the Bard and his hopping pots, Babbitty Rabbity cackling away inside her tree stump, the Fountain of Fair Fortune and all the rest of it. Fairy stories, the lot, that pressed the moral into a child's hand at the end and spared him the bother of working anything out for himself. Moody had no use for a tale that did a man's thinking for him. He taught the boy chess, besides, and found he had a true head for it — a patient, vicious streak that ran three moves deeper than you would ever credit — though he had yet to take a single game off the old man.
Ten minutes to the dot, scrubbed pink and his boots left at the door, Ron presented himself in the living room and dropped into his usual chair with the look of a hound that had heard the cupboard open. He was still not fully clean, from what Moody could see — but who cared about a bit of dirt on the boy's clothes, so long as the head above them was clear and vigilant.
Moody took a slim, battered volume from the side table and turned it so the boy could read the cover. "Alright, today we start with Whose Body? ” he continued with some grudging respect," a clever woman named Sayers wrote. A man turns up dead in a stranger's bath, wearing nothing in the world but a pair of gold eyeglasses, and there's a clever sort who sets himself to working out who he is and how he came to be there. We'll see how much of it sticks in that head of yours."
He doubted the boy would follow the half of it. The book was written for grown men and women with grown words in their heads. But Moody had never in his life seen the good in talking down to a person, child or no, so he found his place and began to read.
He read slowly, and stopped where the stopping was worth something. When the clever fellow knelt at the side of the bath and went over the dead man inch by inch — the soft, idle hands, the feet that had never gone unshod, the gold glasses sitting on a nose that had plainly never worn a pair in life — Moody laid the book open on his knee.
"There. What's wrong with that?"
Ron worried at his lip. "He's... dead?"
"Besides that."
"He's got no clothes on."
"Closer. Keep going."
The boy stared into the fire for a while. "...The glasses. Why's he wearing glasses if he's wearing nothing else?"
"Aye. That's the whole of it, sitting right there." Moody let something that was not quite a smile crease the good side of his face. "A dead man wears what he died in, or he wears nothing at all. He does not wear another man's spectacles. Somebody set those on his face. And the moment you find the one thing in a room with no honest reason to be there, you've found your thread. Pull on it, and the rest comes apart in your hands."
It was the same lesson he had drummed into a hundred frightened recruits down in the Garden, only this one was small enough to swing his legs clear off the chair, and he listened as though his life hung on every word. The clever fellow in the book noticed too much and explained himself far too cheerfully for Moody's liking — an idle rich man playing at murder for the sport of it — but the method beneath the silk was sound, and the method was what he wanted the boy to carry off. Not the dressing-gowns and the clever talk. The looking. The seeing of the thing that did not belong.
He read on, stopping here and there to ask the boy where he would look next, or what he made of a thing one of the characters had let slip, and he waited each time while Ron worked at it. Half the answers were nonsense. The other half had the right shape to them, near enough, and Moody told him so, which was as near to praise as the old man ever came.
The boy hung on every word.
They were a good few chapters deep, the light long gone from the windows and the fire burned down to a steady orange, when the flames flared green and Arthur Weasley's head appeared in the grate.
"Evening, Alastor. Ron — your mum's asking after you, it's well past your time." He wore the faintly sheepish, faintly harried look he always had on collecting a child he'd handed off some hours before. "He's behaved himself, I hope."
Ron's face fell all at once and he whined, "We're not finished the book."
"You'll finish it next time," Moody said, closing it on his thumb. "Same hour."
The boy brightened in an instant, scrambled up, snatched his boots from beside the door, and stopped only to fix Moody with a look of total sincerity. "It's wicked, this book. Best one yet. I'm coming back for it."
"I'd not doubt it. Go on, your mother's waiting."
"Thank you, Alastor, truly," Arthur said, as the boy clambered toward the fire. "I do mean it. Don't know what we'd—"
"Off with the pair of you, before Molly sends something through my fireplace a sight worse than you."
Arthur huffed a laugh, gave him a last grateful nod, and his head drew back out of the flames. A breath later the green fire took the boy as well, and the grate was a grate again.