Title: Like Clockwork
Character(s): Mulciber, with Avery and Snape
Word count: ~2,000
Rating: M
Warnings: Domestic violence, murder, implied child abuse, mentioned killing/torture of small animals, mention of bullying, mention of self-harm, questionable sanity, mentions of poor psychiatric hospital conditions in the 60s.
Notes: Written for Lolaaaa's Sensitive/Controversial Topic Challenge, which obviously makes this a sensitive/controversial topic. It's dementophobia, fear of insanity. I do hope I am handling these issues in the most serious and sensitive way I can in the context. Please, please, please let me know what you think.
"Mulciber and Avery's idea of humour is just evil. Evil, Sev. I don't understand how you can be friends with them."
— Lily Evans
Doctors wanna check me,
Poke me and dissect me.
What do they expect?
Feelings, from a wind-up toy?
— Alice Cooper, Wind-Up Toy
They were never not there, but it was worse at night. At night, they swarmed through the slimy tunnels and corridors of the prison like worker ants, their faces black and empty, their cloaks hanging like a sulphurous black fog. It was a cold fog, swirling through the air and drifting across the stone floor and under the bars of his cell. He kept back, against the far wall, the one next to the sea. The outside wall was battered with the cold, salty water, and he had the permanent taste of it in his mouth, mixing with the stench of death that came from all around him. It lay thick and heavy on the back of his tongue, seeping down his throat like some pungent, vile cheese. The corners of the cell had things growing in them: horrible, sea things, borne of damp and decay, brown and slimy, with tentacles that crept up the walls. His shackles cut his wrists red raw, and they were infected with the rust and the dirt and the things that clung to the metal, but the corner was safer than the fog. The fog stayed near the door, and the corner was always safer.
He'd stayed in the corner as he'd watched his parents fight. He'd stayed in the corner as the man he called father snarled and shouted and spat in his mother's face. He'd stayed in the corner for years as he'd watched her tortured, over and over again, face beaten to a pulp, eyes blackened, skin slashed with a kitchen knife, head smashed into the kitchen counter again and again and again for he didn't know how long as she begged and pleaded and screamed for help. But he couldn't leave the corner because if he left the corner he would be hurt, and he was just a child after all.
His father was always telling him to grow a backbone, grow a spine. Stop cowering over there, you pathetic little runt! What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you crying? So he learned not to cry. He learned to feel nothing at all because that was normal, wasn't it? Men weren't supposed to feel. Crying and whimpering was for women and men were supposed to be strong. He knew; he'd practised. He'd captured little creatures, mice and spiders who'd wandered under the door of his room. He'd kept them in jars and shoeboxes and pulled off their tails and legs. Their screams made him almost want to cry but he didn't because he was stronger than that.
And one day he decided he was too big and too strong for the corner and he stopped cowering there and he didn't cry and used the magic his father was so jealous of and he wrung the blood from him. He watched the man die and he was horrified at himself. But men were not supposed to be horrified. This was the sort of thing men like his father were supposed to do. They were made to kill. He wasn't horrified, he told himself, he was excited. He knew it wasn't true, but he couldn't admit to fear and horror – though fear and horror were better, somehow, than feeling nothing at all.
His mother didn't thank him, and she wasn't proud. She sent him away for a summer, to place he couldn't quite remember. He remembered icy water and leather straps and electric shocks. He remembered being in a room very much like this one, but whiter, and the people there smiled at him and talked in soothing voices and told him there was nothing wrong with him. Here, they weren't people, and they just drifted, and sometimes, when the fog that seeped from them managed to crawl its way into this new corner of his, he would remember the darkness of the water and cold grip it had over his lungs. He would remember the jolts that shot through him as the people watching smiled, and he could remember telling them that he knew there was nothing wrong with him. How he acted was exactly how he was supposed to act.
But that was just it: acting. Because he didn't care that his mother couldn't bear to look him in the eye any more or that she behaved around him exactly the way she had behaved around his father. He didn't care about anything. Mostly he just sat in a corner of his bedroom and stared. And in the mornings, and in the evenings, like clockwork, his mother would bring him food. The world grew and thrived and sang and laughed out of the window behind him, but he just stared at the wall. And sometimes he killed spiders.
He was sent away to school when he was a bit older. His mother said, as she put him on the train, that he ought to learn to be with other boys his age. He was late in joining, already in the third year, and most of the other students avoided him. He barely noticed. He sat in the corner between his bed and the wall and pulled the wings off flies. He killed one of the school owls once. That made him laugh. It was a guilty, sinful laugh, but laughter was good, all the same, wasn't it?
Avery heard him. The bird squawked and squawked and its dying voice echoed all around the tower along with his laughter. Avery suggested a slower method, a more torturous spell. He suggested using it on smaller students instead, too. Mulciber couldn't make the idea sit right, at first; he'd been avoiding the other students because, surely, that was what one did? Speaking to other people meant getting hurt. Standing up for yourself meant getting hurt. Using magic meant getting hurt. Avery laughed at him then. First years, he said, cannot hurt you. Mudbloods cannot hurt you. And watching them scream, he said, is funny.
It was, for a bit. Funny was supposed to feel good, Mulciber thought, but it didn't. It was a creeping sort of sensation in his gut, and a thrumming sensation in the back of his throat, and he hated it, but he played along, because that was what he was expected to do. He was expected to love this feeling, so he did whatever he could to get it. Maybe he was just doing it wrong? He learned Avery's spell, against his better judgement, and when he learned that the smaller students were as helpless against it as the insects were against his fingertips he learned more, and he began to relish the feeling, whatever it was, even though he didn't like it, because it was better than the dull emptiness he felt when he was doing nothing at all.
There was another boy, one who was good with spells, and his name was Snape. Snape's father hated magic, too. Mulciber couldn't understand why he wasn't searching for the same sort of high that came from killing things as he himself was. Avery took him aside one day and told him he was going too far. You nearly killed that kid the other day – what the hell were you thinking?
Mulciber wasn't thinking. He didn't think. Because when he thought, he realised how much like his father he was. And he knew that he hated his father. He knew now that other people weren't raised to be like this. There was something wrong with his family, something wrong with his father, and something wrong with him. And he didn't want to act like him any more. But the only thing that gave him any feeling close to pleasure was what he did to the creatures and the other students. He knew now that using Dark magic was sick and twisted and wrong somehow but that couldn't resonate with him and he kept doing it, partly for the screams and the looks on their faces because that made him laugh and partly because he didn't know what else to do. Was he a monster? Was he a madman?
His father must have been mad, surely. And it looked to him as though he was going the same way. Avery got used to it after a while, helped him learn spells from a stolen book of his uncle's. But Mulciber couldn't bear to be in his own flesh any more. The Snape boy was good with magic. He'd made a spell that acted just like the kitchen knife Mulciber's father used to use. Mulciber almost liked it. He used it to slice open the skin on his arms and his chest and the blood made him smile. There. Better.
But it wasn't, not really. Pain and torture gave him feelings but they weren't good feelings and he knew that they were not the only ones he was supposed to have. Try as he might, though, he could not force himself to feel anything else. So instead he sat in his corner of the dormitory, or at the desk at the back of the room, every day, and needled himself in the arm with his quills or hairpins or whatever else he could find, trying to get some sort of pleasure. Every day he woke up and asked What's wrong with me? and failed to find a solution. He hated the sight of his face in the mirror. He was darker than his father and not bald yet but to him it was his father's face and he knew they were both insane. There were not other people like them. This was not how people were supposed to be. He could feel others' judgement in their stares in the hallways, and it made him panic. They knew. It felt as though the walls were closing in, sometimes. He hated them all, and tried to deal with it in the only way he knew how.
So when the Dark Lord had called to him and burned his mark into his arm he had agreed. Here were others like him. They were a well-oiled killing machine, running just like clockwork, the Death Eaters. They killed people, and they laughed about doing it. And now, Mulciber wasn't treated as an outsider. They didn't know he was mad, and, if they did, they had so many mad people amongst them that they simply didn't care. They just let him do the only thing he knew he did right, which was kill, and it still wasn't fun but it was the most fun he'd ever had and even though he could put a name to his feelings now and none of them were pleasure, he was just relieved to have the opportunity to be frightened and disgusted, because being scared of himself was better than the fear that came from absolutely nothing.
And now, he was back in his corner again, chained there, spat on by the icy sea and called a madman, because he wasn't acting like a normal wizard should. Like clockwork, the Dementors came to him twice a day and fed him but didn't speak. He laughed at their silence, and tried to avoid their mist, because it reminded him of those times when he felt nothing. And he was glad he was in prison. His actions gave them cause to treat him like a lunatic. But he would rather be treated like a lunatic than succumb to the blank psychopathy that lapped at the edges of his mind like the North Sea did Azkaban. He sat and stared at the bloodied walls. Sometimes he killed the rats that wandered in.