"Faith"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

Alastor Moody's faith is a deeply private and personal thing, and he holds it close to him. He believes to a depth he cannot express, and he seldom tries. He is a deeply spiritual man, but quietly so. Only those who know him well know this at all; the rest of the world never will.

He has cursed his gods more times than he can easily count, but mostly in his youth, before he really understood that faith was not always easy. He's had times when he has been furious with all of creation, his own gods included. That they had allowed some things to transpire... He hadn't understood it. Still doesn't, in fact. In those days it had made him so angry he couldn't think, he could only scream and hex things into little pieces, until finally he broke down, until he was forced to the realization that what he felt was not anger at all, but grief, grief for pains and losses and lost friends...

In a way he understood faith better after those tears.

Back in the days when he taught classes full of idealistic youths wishing to become Aurors, they asked him how he could continue to believe after all that he has seen, how he could not renounce his gods as they had so clearly forsaken him.

To him this is what faith is; carrying on in the face of reason for doubt. Some answers, he believes, can be found when the sun is shining on him, and things are going his way. And some can only be found when it's so dark he doesn't think he will ever see the sun again. Faith is like that, he thinks. It is not meant to be easy.

He wonders sometimes if it is only those who have been tested, who have known pain, who can truly understand faith. If those who have never known hardship can possibly have any concept of what it is to believe, or of what faith can do for you. Can they know how it can hold you up in times when you have so little else? Can they know how much you can need it, or how it can comfort even a cynical old man who has buried too many friends?

Of all those he's taught, only Penelope Clearwater, bless her strange, beautiful soul, has never asked him to rationalize his faith. He tells her as he has told all of his students, that each of them needs to have a sort of faith, that they need to believe they can stand against the Dark and win. But of all those he has taught, Moody has never had to explain to her why, despite it all, he still believes.

The gods know that they have both seen their faith shaken. And she nearly as much as he, for all that her years should have been a buffer against such things. Much that should have protected Penelope failed in that task, betrayed that trust, and she has paid the price for it, in pain and shattered innocence. He could wish that none of these things had ever happened to her. But Penelope is stronger for all that she has survived, stronger and wiser. He cannot but be glad of that, much as he laments her pain.

He knows her faith has been tested, just as his has. And not for the first time is she his mirror; Moody, too, is stronger for what he has endured.

He believes life's experiences are teachers; he's learned a hell of a lot from his. He believes in himself, believes in his closest friends. He believes in the Aurors and he believes in Penelope. And he believes, with a quiet, unshakable faith, in the gods of his childhood.

He tells precious few any of this, of course. What he tells the others, the students and the members of the Order of the Phoenix, the ones who need to hear such things, is that he believes they will win this war.

Behind that statement is every bit of each kind of faith Alastor Moody has.