DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling.
A/N: This was written for the HPFC Quotes for All Occasions Competition and while the fic itself is not directly related to the quote, it was inspired by it, at least inasmuch as I thought that it suited Moody's character.
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."- G.K. Chesterton
~ Temperance ~
Alastor Moody, after becoming separated from his fellow Aurors during a long battle, now has a single female Death Eater cornered in an alley.
His opponent does not seem overly concerned with her position, even though she has lost both her wand and the knife with a curse-infused blade that served as her secondary weapon. Her mask, a demon face complete with fangs and long back-swept horns, leaves the bottom half of her face exposed. The corners of her mouth are smeared with blood.
"I won't be taken alive," she says, sliding a hand into the folds of her cloak.
Alastor grips his wand tighter, a disarming spell on the tip of his tongue, but what she pulls out of her pocket is not a weapon - it is a deck of cards.
"I won't tell you my name," she says as she shuffles the cards. "But you can call me-" She pulls the top card from the deck and flips it over so that he can see it.
It is hard to tell at this distance which one it is. Moody isn't overly familiar with the Tarot deck. He squints to read the name of the card.
"Temperance?" he says, nonplussed.
She frowns and shakes her head, then looks down at the card. He can't see her eyes through the holes in the mask, but her surprise is evident in the way her mouth goes slack at the sight of the card. She shuffles it back into the deck, and draws three cards.
She looks utterly spooked by what she sees in them, shaking her head and murmuring, "This isn't right."
She seems to have forgotten his presence... or so he thinks, until her head snaps up and he can almost feel her gaze boring into him.
"We will have a reckoning, Moody," she says, "another time."
She blinks out of existence with a sharp bang of displaced air, and he mentally curses himself for not stunning her while she was playing around with the cards. She'd probably meant to intimidate him by telling him to call her Death - but when she pulled the wrong card, it seemed as though she seriously took it as some kind of ill omen.
Over the years, they encounter each other many times.
He loses an eye to her cursed blade, as well as a leg. He gives her a few scars of her own, and several times he thinks he has left her fatally wounded, but then at the next battle she is there, conspicuous in her demon mask, always with blood in the corners of her mouth (a biter, is she?), at times laughing, other times spouting gibberish about "the reaper" and "the land beyond".
Always, when she finds herself facing him, she consults the cards. And each time when the corners of her mouth pull down, he knows that she has drawn the Temperance card and that the death she so eagerly wishes to visit upon him will once more be delayed, although he still does not understand why.
Once, he sees the full contents of the three-card draw that inevitably follows the initial single-card reading. The Heirophant, Death, Temperance. He doesn't know what it means, even after researching possible interpretations. Divination was never his strong suit anyway.
It does, however, give him a clue to her identity. He speaks to Dumbledore, without telling the older wizard why he is asking, and discovers that there is only one witch in the current generation other than Sybill Trelawney who earned a NEWT in Divination. Trelawney may be a loon, but she certainly isn't a Death Eater. It must be the other one, then, who laughs at him from behind the demon mask.
After the execution of Barty Crouch Junior, Alastor pays a visit to Azkaban.
The prisoner he has come to see is stretched out on the floor of her cell, covered in a fine silver mist. As he approaches, the mist coalesces into the form of a great white shark. A Patronus, quite strong, and wandlessly cast.
"I could have escaped at any time, you know," she says, lifting her head to look at him through the bars.
He wonders why she did not, but finds himself unable to speak. She is not beautiful - she was never beautiful - but there is a spark in her eyes that he first saw on the battlefield, which has not gone out even after thirteen years of imprisonment, and he finds himself transfixed. There is something wrong about her - something that has never been right, but became more and more twisted the further she went down the dark path. She is just as scarred and broken on the inside as he is on the outside, and for a moment he thinks that if they were not on opposite sides of this war, he could have loved her.
"I was waiting," she says.
He wants to ask what she waiting for. He wants to ask if she knows. If she knows about Barty, if she knows what happened, if she knows that her master has returned. He swallows, but the dry feeling in his throat doesn't go away.
She trails the index finger of her right hand along the tattered fabric encasing her left wrist. "He hasn't called for me."
She knows.
"Someone else calls," she says.
Who does?
"The Reaper calls."
"Temperance," he croaks out. Whether it is a plea or a protest, or something else, he isn't sure.
"You're the only one who calls me that, you know," she says. "My name is Lilith. I thought you would have learned it by now."
He knows. But she will always be Temperance to him.
"Alastor," she says. She smiles when she sees that she has startled him - not a mocking smirk, but a smile of genuine amusement. "See? I've learned your name, as well." She pauses, waiting for... what? Praise? When he fails to respond, she continues, "As I was saying, the Reaper calls."
Wait. His lips move but the sound gets stuck in his throat.
"I'm done waiting," she says. "My time was up years ago, but I managed to cling to the last threads of life for longer than I should have. I waited to see that prediction resolved."
That prediction... The one from the day they first met? Finally he understands the meaning behind the cards, or at least what meaning she read into them. The Heirophant, with its primary meaning of a cult. Temperance, with its primary meaning of waiting or patience. And Death, with its secondary meaning of change or a turning point. He feels sick as he realizes that she spared his life due to being forewarned of his instrumentality in the Dark Lord's resurrection.
The grizzled Auror remains silent as his old nemesis continues to speak.
"I've always wanted to see what's on the other side. Now the Reaper comes for me, and I shall go gladly into his arms."
She closes her eyes and lowers her head until her cheek is pressed against the stone. She places one hand over her heart, and exhales deeply. The white-silver shark disperses into mist which then evaporates into the ether.
She does not breathe in.
As he stands staring at the corpse of his Temperance, Alastor slowly begins to realize that being on opposite sides of the war had not stopped him from loving her.
~end~