Running Close to the Ground

Chapter Two: The Ballad of the Death Eaters

There must be some way out of here,

Said the joker to the thief...

- Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"

"Avery, mate," I whisper when my partner opens his eyes for a moment. "Let's go to the pub."

He makes a sound that is a cross between a grunt and a groan. "I'm not drinking. I'm never going to drink again."

"Still shaking off the hangover from last night?"

"Nnghh," he says, burying his head in the pillow. I think this means yes.

"C'mon," I urge him. "People. Food. It'll make you feel better. Better than sitting around in a dark room full of bugs all night, anyway."

"Oh, all right," he says, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling on yesterday's socks. "But I swear I'm not drinking anything. You can lead a horse to water - but it might drown."

Avery's always had trouble with proverbs.

We go out in the rain and the gathering darkness, wrapping our overcoats around us to cover our robes, and stop in at the first pub that looks gloomy enough for us to pass without notice. I order a whiskey and he asks for a lemonade - but before I'm halfway through my second drink, he's caught up with me, just as I knew he would, and by the time I've finished my third, he's well on his way to drowning. Avery's a half-decent bloke, which means he can't very well get through an evening without getting pissed. There are only two kinds of people in the Dark Lord's service, true believers and drunks, and you want to stay away from the true believers if you can help it.

"Eat, drink, and be merry," says Avery, raising his glass, "for tomorrow we might be alive."

Indeed. We wouldn't have to get drunk half so often if dying were the worst thing that could happen to us - or to the unfortunate people who get in our way. (What, you think we enjoy being ordered to torture and murder? Avery and I are Death Eaters, not sadists. It's the Bellatrix Lestranges of the world that you have to look out for.)

On the off chance that I've made life in the service sound at all exciting, it's not. It consists of short bursts of terror and long stretches of watching and waiting, when you try to kill time any way you can. As the whiskey begins to go to my head, I start singing a bit of doggerel that I made up during the boring moments.

A grand old crew are we,

The Dark Lord's hand-picked minions.

We wipe his bum and act like we're dumb

And hide our own opinions.

"That's us, all right," says Avery, chuckling and draining his glass. "Pathetic lot, aren't we? Dunno how he thinks he's going to pull off world domination with us."

Malfoy is selling off his manor

Brick by brick for bail,

Karkaroff's on the run these days,

And Jugson's still in jail.

Crabbe and Goyle cannot read,

Rosier and Wilkes are dead,

Dolohov no speak English good,

Nott's daughter's off her head.

Avery shakes his head and joins in on the chorus. "The worst of it is, there's no good way out, is there?"

Bellatrix is a sociopath,

And so is Walden Macnair;

Snivellus bullies little kids

And never washes his hair.

Crouch, Junior is a dementor,

But he still misses his mother.

Rodolphus pretends he doesn't know

His wife's the Dark Lord's lover.

"That's not true. Is it? Euughh!" Avery just about chokes on his whiskey.

"Who cares if it's true? Everybody believes it, and that's all that matters." Like I said, Avery's pretty much an honest man, and that puts him at a disadvantage around the rest of us.

Rabastan doesn't give a damn,

Travers thinks he's a seer.

Bardolph Avery and me

Are the only normal ones here.

AND WE'RE SCARED!

Avery pounds his glass on the table and starts to sing in a voice thick with drink and weariness:

Bardolph Avery and me

Are the only normal ones here.

"You ARE Bardolph Avery, you daft twit."

"Wormtail and me ..." he tries in a quavering singsong. "Doesn't scan."

"I have a proper name, you know." (In theory, the others aren't supposed to know who I am, but the trouble with running a super-secret organization in the wizarding world is that it's hard to find recruits who didn't go to school together. Besides, as you'll have already gathered, we're bigger gossips than my mum's sewing circle.)

... Peter Pettigrew and me

Are the only normal ones here.

AND WE'RE SCARED!

Good, now if it reaches the Dark Lord's ears, he'll think Avery wrote it. I may have been a Gryffindor, but discretion's the better part of valor sometimes.

"Drink up," calls the barman, beginning to stack chairs on tables. (Stupid Muggles and their completely unreasonable licensing laws. There are times I wonder if the Dark Lord might actually have the right idea.)

"Peter," Avery slurs, leaning on my shoulder for balance as we get up to leave. "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful ... end."

"I hear you, mate. Now stand on your own two feet, you big lunk. You're heavy."

* * *

And that would be the end of the evening, like so many drunken evenings before and after it, but to my surprise, Avery still remembers the song in the morning. I hear Jephthah Nott humming it under his breath after our next meeting, and then Crabbe and Goyle pick it up - they don't seem to mind that it insults them. Before I know it, the song has spread through the whole organization. No one dares to sing the words out loud, but everybody seems to be whistling or humming the tune except the Dark Lord himself and a handful of his higher-ups. People like Bellatrix Lestrange and Lucius Malfoy, and ... Snivellus Snape?

I don't think old Snivelly's a true believer. Too much of a cynic, that one. And as much as I hate to give him credit for anything except bad hygiene and a worse personality, he hasn't been rewarded in proportion to his brains. He spent eight weeks over the summer holidays making the village of Little Hangleton Unplottable, without help from any of us, and the Dark Lord hasn't so much as thanked him.

No, I'm pretty sure I know the real reason why he isn't humming the same tune as the rest of us, why he takes a little too much care to play the role of the perfect Death Eater. He's playing a dangerous game.

I reckon that's his own lookout. I'm not about to stick my neck out for him, or for the Dark Lord either. Me, I play a safe game. I follow orders, I don't draw attention to myself, I hedge my bets, I run close to the ground.