Homo Homini Lupus

He was hyperventilating. His red hair, dyed darker with blood - both his and others' - was plastered to his forehead. His freckles were connected, like some macabre connect-the-dot game, with more blood. Blood was in his eyes and staining his shirt. He could not breathe.

He had always loved the colour red, even when he was a small child. His old room at home, a home in which he was no longer welcome, a home where he had made himself unwelcome, was decorated in red, many shades of red: ruby, crimson, scarlet, rose, cherry, burgundy, cerise, carmine, rubicund, russet, and vermillion. When he was at school, when he was an impressionable schoolboy, his colour was red; red and gold, gold like the light at sunset and red like the blood in his veins. He had even filled his rat's nest London flat in shades of red, as well as he could afford.

He did not think he could ever look at the colour red again. He would not be able to see it without vomiting, without trying to empty his innards - and fragmented pieces of his soul - into the bin. And then, maybe, even his vomit would be red. Red with his blood.

"Get a grip," a harsh male voice ordered. He registered it as Munro, his superior, somewhere in his brain not preoccupied with blood and pain and death and wounding and fear and blood and blood blood blood blood blood blood, ohsweetmerlinthebloodwaseverywhere!

He was slapped, some of the blood smearing from his cheek and into his mouth. The startlingly, surprisingly sharp pain of the slap and the fearful iron tang of the blood on his tongue - he was tasting blood, he was tasting blood, hecouldtastetheblood! - shocked him out of his breathless fear.

"Be a man. You're not wounded, are you? 'Course you aren't. You're a good lad, stayed out of the line of fire."

He lifted up his head, his eyes blinking back blood and tears, to see Munro, the stout Scotsman, standing over him, nearly like a proud father over a son who just learned to fly, not at all like an older minister standing over a younger one, both spattered with the blood of a battle, of a massacre, of a slaughter, that should never have happened, that according the Minister and the government, would never happen, that according to his family and their little radical group, was inevitable. Perhaps that group was not so radical after all. Munro's cheeks were spattered with blood, the blood of enemies and the blood of allies and the blood of men and the blood of women and the blood of strangers and the blood of friends and he hoped he hoped he hoped not the blood of family. He did not have so much blood, not colouring his silver hair red-black with the lifeblood of the dead, maybe he was standing behind, maybe he was further away, maybe he was not near the killing and bleeding and dying and wounded and screaming and bleeding and bleeding and bleeding -

"Sweet Merlin," he gasped. "Blood!"

"Got it all over you, didn't you?" Munro said. "I suppose we all did, didn't we? Good thing we got out of that in time. Almost thought for a little while we weren't going to make it. But here we are, eh? Nothing like a brush with death to make you feel alive, eh, Weasley?"

He stared at him. Munro, his senior in the Ministry, an avuncular older man, looked, not cheerful, but less than horrified. Had he not been by his side? Had he not seen the men in masks, the women in masks, torturing children? Did he not see the blood, unclotted, fall from the wounds of their colleagues? Did he not see the lacerations on MacMurrough's back? Did he not see the bloodless face of Jameson when he saw the enemies in white masks descend upon them in the London street?

"Here." Munro handed him a warm, wet towel, perhaps conjured from the air, perhaps given to Munro first by a Ministry attendant. "Clean off your face. We will have to report this to the proper department."

He stared at the white towel, flecked with red, red and white, evil and good, lifeblood and cotton. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe that group was not so radical. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, as the blood crusted in his hair and along his face and revealed a laceration along his own cheek, just maybe he had made the wrong choice.

But, regardless of right and wrong, of life and death and pain, he did not know how to go home. Home was red.