Barty Crouch, Jr. (unkissed) wrote in crackwarts, @ 2008-11-12 10:23:00 |
|
|||
Sleeping...
...Oh, right, Barty had been planning on doing that a few hours ago. Usually, the potions made it easy to sleep -- how could he not want to sleep when being awake was occasionally a chore, just given how sedated he normally was? Being awake might as well have been sleeping, sometimes. As much as he wished it could just be about them, Barty had to acquiesce: Kshathra and Aloysius had work to attend to (moreso now that Kshathra had suddenly found himself Head of the DoM), and Pepper had other places to haunt, and, well, Sirius Black was some of the worst company imaginable.
There were the younger Unspeakables, of course, but several of them were just people better avoided -- Zeller (Barty was not fond of him, but he was better than some of the others; at least he did his job properly), Yaxley (Ben's grandson, interestingly enough, and one of the good ones), Goldstein (Barty had taught her parents during the school year he'd spent as Moody; he'd been one of the ones recommending her biological father for Prefect-dom following a rather impressive incident when the boy had demanded to know why it was necessary to watch the Unforgivables being performed; but Barty was less than fond of that one; she borderline flirted with Sirius Black, and she'd probably caught whatever brain parasite he had), Entwhistle (her parents had been rather unmemorable, beyond being Ted and Andromeda, mark 2), Zabini (the only one Barty took express pains to avoid; really, even if he wasn't his family's heir, the boy failed miserably at acting like he had any self-respect, let alone a proper, Pureblood upbringing... then again, though, his parents had named him Artemis. It wasn't quite "Bartemius Hallam, Junior," but it was up there with "Albus Severus" on the list of "entirely unfortunate names that no child should ever have needed to be subjected to"). --
...But Kshathra was slowly getting Barty off the potions, which made it hard to sleep, which wasn't in the slightest helping the fact that, increasingly, Barty found his thoughts in utter disarray. So far, he hadn't tried to stab himself in the hand with a broken test tube (nor did he want to; that, it seemed, would have been an exceptionally stupid idea), but he had intermittent flashed of hot and cold, without the ability to maintain some constant body temperature; sometimes, his thoughts raced, and sometimes, there was nothing he could think aside from blank space, and sometimes, they weren't racing as much as they were just irritatingly incomplete and, when he tried, he could never bring them to a close, even after trying to chase them for ten minutes.
But the worst part, though, was that he was finding it exceedingly difficult to sleep. For the past few nights, he'd at least managed three to four hours, but, when you were used to getting between seven and nine hours, only finding three to four was rather akin to pointing a wand at your own head and casting the Cruciatus. Not nearly as physically painful, no, but between the bodily exhaustion, the increasing mental disorganisation, the difficulty staying awake during the day and the trouble it was to make anything positive out of the accidental naps he wound up taking, the snapping emotions -- how he'd ever managed it on less sleep than this was a true mystery.
Well, to be fair, there were times that he hadn't really managed. Severus could attest to that and, had they been alive, Regulus, Demetrius, and Antonin could have as well.
The last of the four was the most recent source of interest. For all the hours that Barty hadn't spent sleeping, he'd been trying to read and had found himself constantly looking up from the book and back over his shoulder; either he saw something, or he thought he did, or, sometimes, he just felt like something was behind him. There was never anything there, though. For every flash of something that he thought he saw, all he got for checking was momentary nausea, a brief headache, and an increased heart rate that took forever to get calm again -- like he hadn't gotten an increased heart rate enough from simply being off the potions; that much, he knew would even itself out after a while.
This, too, Barty was fairly certain fell under the heading "potions withdrawal, interesting side effects of," but with all the ghosts floating around anymore, one couldn't be sure, and, for all he knew that the mentor in question was liable not to be pleased with where things were, at present, Barty couldn't help but wish that he had been actually in the room, rather than what he most likely was: a projection of Barty's addled little brain.
There was something to be said, though, for mixed hope and, one of his healing texts opened to the section on cardiac disorders, Barty turned from his bookshelf and faced his likely hallucination -- short, greying, well dressed, unassuming and presumably not in the least bit dangerous (which Barty knew very well to be an incorrect presumption)...
"Antonin," Barty said cautiously, biting gently on his lower lip. This was either very good or very bad, but it was too soon to tell and, unfortunately, was not likely to simply go away because Barty half-heartedly wished it that would.