two sinking ships [] alastor & remus
Alastor adored routine; Alastor abhorred routine.
His parents had required a son more than they wanted a child, and approaching his thirtieth birthday Moody couldn't find him in himself to begrudge them this wanting. He remembered vividly the mornings he'd spent at home before school, where everything he did was timed down to the minute, and the only thing worse than the ticking of the clock was the punishment his father would think up if he failed to keep to schedule. It taught him discipline almost as much as it taught him how to count the seconds accurately, and so many years on he sometimes caught himself wondering which of the two was the more useful skill. As a man, his sheer reliance on routine, on minutes and hours waxed and then waned as experience replaced youthful trust. The course of your life didn't rest upon on your ability to shower in five minutes; indeed, the more you fall into routine, into schedules, into the comfortable, the more your defenses dropped, the more you grew complacent, the more you grew predictable.
With the war, with his injury, he could not afford to be predictable. Thus, he varied his schedules. Thus, he took pains to change his routine. His enemies would never see him coming.
Yet there remained something comfortable in the scheduled, whether or not it was written in ink or blood, and he felt the tug of habit as acutely as he imagined even the most free spirited of their kids must. Moody tried little routines to satisfy this desire: he would roll his sleeping bag up as tight as it would go and tuck it besides his desk, for example, or else he would arrange his maps and papers in a certain order at a specific time in the evening so he awoke to a fresh slate. None of this satisfied him for long-- soon enough his sleeping bag was left on the floor, and his maps covered his desk and walls like cheap paint, and he was left with a quiet ache of something to rely upon, to frame the ticking seconds of the day against and feel like something was accomplished when it so often felt like he did nothing but wear a deeper track into the old wooden floor of his room.
When what he needed came to him, it wasn't of his own devising or even of his conscious effort. It was a habit born of pure coincidence and two pairs of hands that sought the same relief at the same time. Coincidence. Moody hated that word. He'd been taught there was no such thing, and so in the dark of night he reasoned it wasn't truly coincidence so much as it was a reasonable occurrence. They were both stressed; they both needed relief; they shared a small territory; it stood to reason, then, that they would run into each other with their half smoked cigarettes and share a small flame together, as it would be a wasted effort for them both to summon a fire.
Alastor couldn't pinpoint when it became a daily event, but every day at two o'clock more-or-less on the dot, the pair of them found one another sitting on the back porch of their sixth cottage with their unlit cigarette in hand, waiting for the other to join them before lighting up. Remus, with his numerous scars and bruises, his wandering eyes and slender fingers wrapped around his cigarette, had become something akin to a friend, for whatever that word meant nowadays. Lupin, for however little Moody really knew the quiet boy who had designed their sanctuary, became a comforting presence for roughly fifteen minutes every day. Some small part of him looked forward to their daily meetings, where they might sit in silence or shoot the shit or discuss their latest meeting in hushed, rasping voices, as a sort of relief from the rest of his days and nights.
Two o'clock came, and much as he struggled with routine, the small part of him that found solace in the recognizable bid him to his feet, bid him to leave his room for the first time in too many hours, crumbling cigarette rolling back and forth in his hand. It didn't take him too long to plod his way across the rocky sand between the cottages, and soon enough he spied a familiar figure hunched in on himself seated on the stairs they so often took as their bench. Alastor did not say anything as nothing needed to be said; he gripped the rickety railing tight to lower himself down to sitting besides the younger man, and without another word rubbed his fingers together, wordlessly producing a small fire for them both to share if Remus was so inclined. The sun and the sand and the surf hung especially heavily over him that afternoon, and Moody had no intentions of breaking the silence if he didn't.
