"A Bad Year"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

Fear of the dark. Claustrophobia. Memories which return in nightmares, memories of being a prisoner in his own skin.

Nightmares, fears and memories, a few more scars for his collection.

Parting gifts from Barty Crouch, the younger.

The boy (and he'll always think of Crouch as a boy, no matter how far beyond his years Azkaban had aged him) who stole his identity and tried to steal his soul.

It was a bad year.

This is what Alastor Moody tells people on the rare occasions he speaks of it at all.

It was more and far worse than that, of course, but anyone to whom he would ever speak about this is well aware of that.

After nine months alone in the dark, there are times he cannot stand to step outside after nightfall. After nine months in the cold and damp of the trunk, he finds that cold cuts through him quicker and sharper and deeper than it ever did before.

Not a day goes by that he doesn't think of it- the pain, the fear, and the shame that still walks hand-in-hand with that fear.

He is an Auror, as much a Gryffindor as the day he was Sorted, and he is not supposed to be afraid of anything. Is not supposed to be so crippled by fear such as this, fear that still wakes him in the night. He is shaking, on those nights, cold sweat breaking over his skin, and he tells himself (or Penelope tells him) that it's over, but the truth is that in some ways it won't ever be over.

The dreams never change, but they don't have to. Little changed in all the months Crouch had him locked away.

He remembers telling time by the changing colors of his bruises. Remembers, too, having lost count more than once, when the bruises overlapped one another and he couldn't tell the purplish-red of a fresh one from the greens and yellows of an old bruise.

Never in his life had he felt so powerless as he had then, bound by Crouch's magic. Alastor Moody was not a man who dealt particularly well with being powerless.

He had been for so long the one who advocated constant, never ceasing vigilance, failing at it in an absolutely crucial moment, and paying the price for that failure.

Moody had feared the abuses Crouch might make of the trust others placed in him, while he wore the old Auror's face. Of all the members of the Order of the Phoenix, Moody himself was the one the others were least likely to ever believe had been compromised this way. They laughed at his paranoia, but they counted upon it as well, took it on faith that he would always remain who and what he was- Moody, unshakable.

He's told them not to trust anybody, but they trust him, and Moody feared they would all be damned for it, that year.

In some ways they were.

He's been hurt before- he's been beaten down, battered and scarred more times than he can count, but he's never been that close to broken.