Title: Continuity
Disclaimer: I own nothing except physical copies of the books and Internet access. I make no money off of this, either.
Pairings: None. This isn't a romance at all.
Rating: T for Tame.
Warnings: Me attempting to be deep or something. I don't know. Does my attempt at writing deserve a warning?
Summary: In his adult life, Mundungus Fletcher lived to chase after the next glimmer, but sometimes, he remembered an existence where the only glimmer he followed was the yellow stripes in his schoolboy tie.
Author's Note: Let's just say that this week hasn't been going so well and leave it at that. I desperately needed a distraction and a short deviation from the fanfiction path I normally travel.
This is my first entry for the Snakes and Ladders Challenge by Fire the Canon, and Mundungus Fletcher was my first chosen character.
There's not much of a plot here. Just me trying to catch a small glimpse of the man underneath the rags.
To almost everyone in the world around him, Mundungus Fletcher looked like the scum of the Earth. Swathed in rags, his bloodshot, baggy eyes continually darting around, he looked like he knew he belonged under someone's shoe and was just biding his time, scuttling away on his bandy legs and prolonging the inevitable.
Mundungus did not know or care what he looked like, though. He did not own a mirror most of the time, and even the rare moments he did, he pawned it away as quickly as possible, because money was more valuable than vanity, and a man like him did not have the time to primp.
Life for Mundungus was that of continual movement, and his eyes simply moved to match it. Home was a cloak propped up on sticks, and home could always be carried on his squat person. Other than that, nothing existed for him except the glimmer of potential wealth, and he chased the glimmer every moment of the remainder of his existence.
Objects. They were his world. Inspecting, obtaining, trading, bartering, selling. He did it all, and he did it quickly, so that he could chase after the next glimmer. For so many years, he worked hard and he worked unrelentingly, to the point where time itself ceased to exist to him, at least in a grander sense. What use had he for weeks and months when the glimmer could be snatched up by someone else in a matter of seconds? Time was relative, and to him it was the drunken old father who had forgotten his name, existing in the background only to shout expletives and remind him it was alive and waiting for dinner, and there he was, always scavenging for the abandoned, unprotected, and/or forgotten crumbs of human achievement.
It was not always this way, but if you asked him to find the seam that connected the happier days to the miserable days, he would only blink blankly before shrugging, stumbling off, and picking your pocket watch in the process.
There were some days when he remembered, though. Perhaps he'd run into someone with a yellow cloak, and just before he took her brooch, he would remember seeing that very shade of yellow once before, edged with black.
His whole life used to be yellow and black at some long-lost point. Despite the whispers and insinuations nowadays that he had been born wrapped in green and silver (since, after the war, green and silver had been synonymous with evil and unsavoriness), he had actually once been a proud little badger, humming the Sorting Hat lines comfortably as he scribbled essays on his parchment, the song so familiar that he filled every stretch of silence with it as if it were his favourite friend to revisit.
"You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true,
And unafraid of toil."
Although his clothes back then had been ratty, too, he would always offset that off-black with the glimmer of his yellow-and-black tie, and that tie used to be his most prized possession, the only glimmer he ever followed.
Yet those were old days, days that crumpled under the ever-increasing weight of the present. He cannot tell you the progression of events that brought him here anymore, since poverty is not as exciting in real life as it is in the books. There were no harmoniously singing beggars, no idealistic grandsons, and no morally conflicted ex-convicts. There was only hunger and cold and need, and even the song of his childhood faltered and faded away.
The days and nights did not form a seamless plotline to be followed and tracked by breathless bodies; each cycle of waking and sleeping held its own conflicts that were either resolved in a rush of action or shoved aside and forgotten by the next cycle, and the only witness would be he, Mundungus Fletcher, who was really only a set of rags and bandy legs, his mind numbed by need.
There was one cycle, however, that sparked his mind again, that shocked the numbness away.
He was scuttling away, pursued by his creditors, who were rubbing their fingers and asking for coin. He thought he could make it, thought his little legs could take him, but he tripped over a cobblestone and fell to his hands and knees.
"Yer gon' get it, Fletch," spat one of them, and Mundungus could feel the spit on the nape of his neck. "Give back what's ours."
He turned around, ready to face his death, fully expecting a foot on his belly, when suddenly a blast of yellow light flung them away.
Yellow in the darkness. A note played in his mind, hesitantly beginning the tune again.
When he looked up at his saviour, he was confronted with piercing blue eyes behind half-moon glasses.
"Mundungus Fletcher," intoned the voice of his hero. "I have been seeking you."
The voice continued and said more words, words that were doubtless flowery and elegant and captivating, but Mundungus wasn't listening to any of them, focusing instead on the man's face.
He was smiling benevolently like he owned the world, like he believed in himself and his vision, but Mundungus had learned to read between the barely-illuminated lines in men's faces in his dealings in the darkness.
Suffering. Loss. Regret. A man who had lost something very valuable in his quest for greatness, in his pursuit of the special glimmer that the mortal man cannot see.
One thought ran through his head, one emotion, one desire—to help this man who saved him, whoever he was, whatever he needed, because here he was, needing Mundungus, needing the man who belonged under a shoe.
"Loyalty," he gasped out, and the older man paused in his speech.
"Yes, Mundungus. What I need from you is your loyalty. Can you give me that?"
Mundungus held out his hand, and the man pulled him up, not even flinching at his filth.
"Just and loyal, those patient Hufflepuffs are true and unafraid of toil," he sang.
The man smiled like he understood, his blue eyes twinkling, the most beautiful glimmer Mundungus had ever seen. "That is exactly it. Come with me."
Hand in hand, the scum and the saviour went off to set the grand plotline in motion.
And of course, you know the rest of the story, all the way up to the grand resolution.
But once it was over, once those eyes closed for the last time, Mundungus simply picked up his cloak and chased the next glimmer.
Life continued.