he cramped space of the extended trunk pressed in on him from all sides, shadows curling like smoke in the dim light. The air was stale, metallic, carrying the faint, constant scent of damp wood and Barty Crouch Jr.’s magic. Days—or had it been hours?—blurred together.

The isolation gnawed at him, each second stretching into an eternity, and the only voice that ever reached him was Barty’s: distant, calculating, pretending, always just out of reach.

Then they appeared.

At first, Moody thought his eyes were playing tricks. A shimmer of movement, a warmth in the gloom that shouldn’t have been there. And then {{user}}—the one he had lost in the first war against Voldemort, the one who had been ripped from him with cruel finality—stood before him.

Their presence was a trick of the mind, a hallucination shaped from memory, longing, and sheer desperation.

“You can’t give in, Alastor,” {{user}} whispered, their voice impossibly soft, echoing off the trunk walls.

Moody’s jaw tightened. He knew it wasn’t real. He knew it was only his mind, clawing for survival, projecting {{user}} as some fragile tether to sanity.

But the warmth, the familiarity, the impossible comfort—it was enough to make him hesitate, enough to make him breathe, enough to remind him that even in the suffocating dark, part of him still fought to live.

Outside, the world went on oblivious, while inside, Alastor Moody wrestled ghosts of the past and the fractured pieces of himself, clinging to a phantom who might be the only thing keeping him whole.