Mad World

“All around me are familiar faces
worn out places, worn out faces
rising early for the daily races
going nowhere, going no where”

After he apparated to the meeting place he glanced around and looked at all that was left of the inner circle. The gaunt faces of the ‘survivors’, more like the damned; it was the lucky ones that died. They were all here at the bidding of there own person devil; their hell, their lives revolved around him. Each and every last one of them was tied to the dark lord, to his life and his death; they lived to serve him. And yet, they hated him, loathed him for twisting them into who…what they were now.
The gaunt faces of his fellow “loyalists” stared ahead with the expression of zombies. It was a scene he had become familiar with a long time ago, a face he bore all the same. No mask could hide this injustice, but they craved it; because it was all they had left. Stone faces of the persecuted and the ultimately damned shells of the wicked. Oh, how much he felt like he was a hollow nothing, but he new he still possessed a soul, he had seen enough of the soulless lying in St. Mungo’s to tell him that. His soul may have still been in his body but it had rotted, died and rotted years ago, just like all those he saw around him. They’re worn out faces turning this graveyard into a nightmare that he sot out and let it envelop him.

“The tears are filling
up their glasses
no expression, no expression”

These meeting always held the ghosts from that fateful meeting eighteen years ago, when everything changed. He could still remember how he had silently cried behind his mask and then the feeling that his soul died a little bit more than at the other meetings, how his heart grew heavier and darker, and how his mind split and reformed again with ruins and lost memories. That meeting had affected all of them, each becoming a little more damned and a little more insane, but it had affected one more then the rest; she never got over it. He could still hear the screams.

(Flashback)

(He had been screaming, it never seemed to end. Gideon Prewett lay upon the floor at the Dark Lord’s feet, receiving every brutal, vicious curse the snake could come up with. Bella, oh sweet Bella; her screams and cry’s weren’t enough to make the dark lord stop torturing the one man she could give her heart and soul to. And then the worse imaginable thing happened. The dark lord pulled her into the center of the circle and threw her down at his feet.
“Where is your loyalty, Bella?” “Where, Bella?”
“With you, my lord, always with you”, she was weeping now, her tears beginning to slow.
“If that were true this…this little obsession of yours wouldn’t be at my feet”, his eyes flashed a deeper red than usual." “Where does your loyalty lie?” He pulled her to her feet and forced her wand into her hands. “Let this be a lesson to you, all of you. They cannot be trusted, none of them.” Then he pushed her toward Gideon. “Kill him. Kill him out of your loyalty to me”
She gripped her wand the tears coming in torrents now. “I’m sorry” If he hadn’t been watching her mouth he would have missed the plea and then those two last words that sealed their fate, every last one of theirs, shouted out from those same lips that had caressed the very soul that they were shouted at. “Avada Kedavra”)

“Hide my head I want to
drown my sorrow
no tomorrow, no tomorrow”

They had all come to the same conclusion, ‘the one’s they loved were the one’s that would pay’. They couldn’t leave the dark lord, they would go insane, part of the cursed oath they took upon joining. The only logical thing to do would be to eliminate those they loved from the picture. They could never, would never allow them to come to harm, not like Gideon.
He remembered the way her face had looked when he told her it was over in so many words. The hurt he had seen, the betrayal when he mentioned there being someone else, and then the hate for allowing him to get close enough to hurt her in such a way. It wasn’t that he had been there when her family had fallen pray to death, but what he said now that ended it. Some part of him wanted her to keep fighting, screaming that it wasn’t true, asking him ‘why’ and saying they could work through it. And as he watched her red hair disappear from view another part of him died and began to rot. The same fate awaited them all.

“And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
but, when people run in circles it’s a very, very
mad world, mad world”


TBC