Chapter 8
1977, February 3rd - Evan
I didn’t mean to get this high. It kind of just happened. One moment I’m talking with Barty, idly rolling an unsmoked joint between my hands, the next I’m dancing around the room, my mind a blur, Barty’s laughter ringing out across the dormitory.
“Y’know,” I gasp, sitting down beside him on the bed. “You should get on this level.”
Barty smiles and shakes his head. “I’m already crazy,” he jokes. “I don’t think I should meddle with drugs.’
I frown, my brain still fuzzy. “You aren’t crazy.” He raises an eyebrow and I giggle. “Well. Maybe a little. But not in a bad way.”
Barty studies me for a long moment. “Thanks.”
I hum, leaning over to kiss him, and we both smile into it, breaking apart only when I start giggling again, falling back onto his bed and staring up at the ceiling. He lies down beside me, his pinky finger brushing mine. It feels like a secret shared, a private thing just for us.
“I love you,” I say, like I’ve said a hundred times before.
“I love you too,” he murmurs. There’s a voice that whispers something in the back of my head, but when I reach for it, it vanishes, blocked by… something. “I really should try harder to stop you from getting this fucked up,” he muses, and I just grin. Suddenly, I’m struck with an idea. A genius idea. One of the best I’ve ever had, I think.
“Barty,” I gasp. “Tattoos!”
He blinks at me, face turned on the pillow to look at me. “Tattoos?”
“You’ve been practicing, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m not nearly good enough to –”
“What I want is easy,” I promise, sitting up. He follows suit, looking unsure.
“I don’t think I should give you something this permanent when you’re high,” he says. I roll my eyes.
“Come on, what happened to being crazy?” Barty glares at me and I sigh. “Look, I promise, I want it. And it’s only small. I swear I won’t regret it.” He gnaws on his lower lip for a moment before groaning.
“Ugh, I can’t deny you anything with that face. Alright. Fine.” He gets up to grab the tattoo stylus and a black pen to trace the design first. “It probably won’t be perfect,” he mumbles, and… is that blush creeping onto his cheeks? I grin, shaking my head.
“That’s fine. Better, even.”
I watch as Barty prepares the equipment. Even after only a couple weeks of practicing, he cleans the needle and loads the ink with perfect muscle memory. I doubt he’s even thinking about the motions. I take the moment to admire him, the locks of hair that fall into his eyes, hair that I know from experience is shockingly soft, the once-green streak now a light blonde as the muggle dye bleaches. I let my eyes trail the angle of his jaw, the faint, nearly invisible freckles that pepper his pale skin. Gorgeous. Every single bit of him. Even the faded bruises that I catch a glimpse of every so often as his shirt shifts with his movements.
“Alright,” he says, looking up from the device and catching my gaze. He pauses, lips slightly parted but whatever he was going to say caught in his throat. He swallows, glancing away. “What?”
“Nothing.” I smirk slightly. “Just admiring.”
My mind feels like cotton, especially after I take another drag on the cigarette dangling from my fingers. Barty huffs, snatching it and stubbing it out on the bedside table.
“What do you want and where do you want it?” He asks. I grab the black eyeliner pen he’s decided to use for the draft and tell him to close his eyes. Raising an eyebrow, he complies, and I quickly push off my trousers. Right beneath the hem of my boxers, as carefully as I can, I draw the design I want. Just three simple letters. Nothing more, nothing less.
The small amount of rational thought remaining in my high-addled brain whispers that this is a bad idea. That friends don’t get friends’s initials tattooed on their upper thigh. But rational thinking is overrated, and I shove that voice to the back of my mind. This is fine. This is normal. Best friends do shit like this. They must, if Barty and I are doing it. Because we are best friends.
“Open your eyes.”
Barty does so, and a strange expression crosses his face as his gaze finds the letters. He’s silent for a long moment, lips slightly parted and eyes wide. There’s that whisper in my mind again, a far off conscience shouting something at me. But I can’t work out what it is. My brain is too muddled, and every time I try to focus on it, I get dizzy.
“I…” Barty swallows, looking up at me. “Okay. Yeah. Sure.”
***
Barty
My mind is going absolutely crazy, and I need it to stop. It’s just a tattoo. Evan is my closest friend, of course it makes sense for him to want this. But there’s something intoxicating about the sight of B.C.J on his skin. Permanent. Irreversible.
I shouldn’t be doing this. Evan is high, he can’t be trusted to make important decisions like this. I should tell him to wait till he’s sober. I should, I should, I should.
But what if he doesn’t want it then?
I grit my teeth and tell Evan to hold still as I position the tattoo pen. Stop. Stop stop stop. Evan flinches as the needle breaks his skin at first, and I find myself grabbing his leg to hold it still, glancing up at him with an apologetic smile.
“Sorry,” I say, voice quiet. He shakes his head, and when I continue, he barely reacts at all. I can feel his gaze on me like trails of fire across my body, but I ignore it, focusing intently on the task at hand. Evan’s draft was perfectly neat, the letters simple and equal in size. It makes it easy to follow without worrying about it being uneven, and I find myself getting a bit lost in the motions.
It takes a while, due to how painstakingly careful I’m being, terrified of messing up. But when I finish and sit back on my heels, I grin like a maniac. It was basic, not much skill required. But I can’t help the rush of glee I feel from accomplishing something. Of getting something right. This is something I can do, and if it gets fucked up, then I have nobody to blame but myself. I can control it.
“Fuck, that hurts more than I expected,” Evan laughs. When I meet his eyes, I see most of the haze has cleared as his high wears off. But to my relief, he doesn’t look horrified at the decision he made in a drug-addled state. He doesn’t look angry that I didn’t stop him. Instead, he just hums, leaning over to inspect the tattoo. It’s in such an… intimate place, in the way that people will rarely see it. It’ll be hidden by nearly anything he wears. I get a strange rush of satisfaction from that, from the fact that this is something special and secret just for us. Evan reaches forward and tugs on the front of my shirt, pulling so that I shift forward until I’m positioned between his legs. He kisses me in that way that makes my mind go blank, endless and purposeless, just because we want to and we can. At some point, my hands move up to weave into golden hair, and I tug periodically, delighting in the soft noises it draws out of him.
Here it is again. This heat building up inside my skin, this moment where we’re faced with a crossroads. Two options. We can end it here, or we can keep going. We can turn down that path we’ve never walked before. I can’t help but wonder if it would change something, change us. Kissing is one thing. Sex is… sex is different. More. It feels harder to play off as just attraction, ironically. Which it shouldn’t. Because it is just attraction. It’s always been just attraction. I’m happy with where we are, I don’t want anything to change, and this… this has the potential to change things.
But fuck, my body wants it so bad. Especially as Evan’s hands wander up under my shirt, fingertips brushing over the fading bruises.
“Evan…” I mumble against his mouth, my fingers tightening in his hair. He groans, tipping his head back, and I have to stop myself from protesting the end to the kiss.
“If you’re going to stop me again, at least stop pulling my hair like that.”
I freeze, blinking at him. “What?”
He meets my gaze, exhaling slowly. “Sorry. That came out wrong. I don’t mean… fuck. It’s fine if you don’t want to. Of course it’s fine. I didn’t mean to imply…” he trails off with an apologetic smile. I hate it. I hate the way there’s a hint of sadness in his eyes, I hate that he must be feeling like there’s something wrong with him, that I don’t want him.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I snap, surging forward and kissing him again, harder this time, more teeth and tongue than anything else. I ignore the voice in my head this time. I ignore the worry that eats away at me, let it fade to nothing as I let my hands wander, as I pull off Evan’s shirt and move my mouth down to his collarbone. As my hand slips between us and under his boxers to touch him, as his breaths turn shaky and his body tenses.
I bite back a grin at the sound of my name tumbling from his lips over and over as his muscles relax, his head falling forward onto my shoulder, his lips ghosting over my skin, exposed at some point in the past few minutes when he pulled my shirt off.
“Fuck,” he breathes, a soft laugh escaping his lips. I smile faintly to myself, my thumb rubbing gently over the spot where I know my initials are now marked upon his skin. And then his hand is moving down between us, and I catch his wrist quickly to stop him. He lifts his head, giving me a confused look.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Another time.”
“It’s not fair, though.”
I squeeze his wrist slightly, shaking my head. “Another time.”
***
Evan
Icy cold water beats down on my skin as I sit huddled in the corner of the shower, breathing heavily. I build the wall back up slowly, brick by brick, forcing the voice whispering truth behind it until I can’t hear it anymore. The wall didn’t come down until I was stumbling into the bathroom a few minutes ago, body still full of euphoria from what Barty had done. As I turned on the water, the voice came.
You love him, you love him, you love him.
Now, I bite down on my hand to hold back the scream of frustration, and slam the wall up with as much force as I can. A moment passes, and I’m on my feet, turning off the water and stepping out, wrapping a towel around my hips and pushing the door to the bathroom open to find an empty room. Barty’s gone.
***
1977, February 7th - Dorcas
Lily Evans still doesn’t like me that much. Or at least, she’s wary of me. I don’t think she believes I’m good enough for Marlene, which is honestly probably true. But I’m hoping today I can try to prove to her I’m not evil, or whatever.
I smile up at the sky. Snow is falling, but only a little. I’ll miss it when winter begins to turn to spring in a few short weeks. The Gryffindors are very loud during quidditch games, I’ve come to learn. Lily leans over to me and shouts over the crowd,
“Can you tell me what’s happening? I don’t understand quidditch at all.” I feel a slight warmth in my chest at the fact that she’s talking to me of her own accord, instead of simply ignoring me as Mary actively does. I look across the pitch, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Gryffindor just scored,” I reply after a moment. “I think it was Marls, actually, from the way everyone’s congratulating her. Hufflepuff is about to shoot… okay, Frank blocked it.”
“Thanks,” Lily says with a small smile. “I can’t be bothered to learn the rules. Cheer when everyone else does, groan when everyone else does, that’s my method. It’s served me well thus far.”
I grin back at her. “Yeah, fair enough. Regulus forced us all to learn the basic rules when he joined the team. He’s a quidditch maniac.” Lily nods stiffly, looking back at the match. Mary and Lily are quite clearly not the biggest fans of some of my group, Regulus especially. “Look, I want us to be friends, but you’re going to have to make peace with the fact that I’m also friends with them.”
Lily glances at me out of the corner of her eye, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. She sighs, pushing some stray strands of fiery hair out of her face. “Yeah, okay. I want us to be friends, too. For Marlene’s sake, at least. But Mary…”
“Mary,” I agree, gritting my teeth.
“She’ll come around,” Lily says, but her voice lacks conviction. “Eventually.”
“You were fucking awesome!” I throw myself at Marlene as she walks out of the changing rooms. She laughs, barely managing to catch me as I wrap my legs around her waist. She may be shorter than me, but she’s shockingly strong. I take her face in my hands and kiss her cheeks, forehead, nose, and finally lips. It probably looks silly. But I don't care. Something about Marlene just makes me so inherently happy, I could burst into a song and dance number and not give a shit what anyone thought.
“Hi,” she says, grinning madly as I kiss her again. There’s a pointed cough from behind me and Marlene gently lowers me to the ground, only to be attacked by Lily with a hug.
“You were great,” Lily exclaims, smiling as she pulls away. Mary is pointedly not looking at me as she congratulates Marlene.
“Dorcas!” An arm is slung around my shoulders suddenly, and I whip my head to see Barty grinning at me. But the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. There’s something strange in his expression, something I can’t quite figure out. Just an… off-ness. “Thought I’d come say hello. To you and your new friends.”
Mary’s glare could’ve killed a weaker person, I think. But Barty doesn’t even seem to notice as he turns his attention to Marlene.
“Hello Barty,” she says, giving him a slightly unsure smile in return. Something is wrong. Barty is being wrong. This is not a good day for him to properly meet Marlene and her friends.
“McKinnon! I don’t believe we’ve ever really conversed. I do hope you’re taking good care of Dorcas here, what with how much you’ve been stealing her from us.” Barty laughs, but it’s that horrible, slightly insane sounding laugh. It’s not normal. It’s wrong. Marlene laughs too, but it sounds forced. She glances at me and I give her an apologetic look.
“Barty,” I say, clearing my throat. “Why don’t we head back to the common room? It’s getting late.”
“Aw,” Barty pouts at me, his fingers drumming on my shoulder in an erratic rhythm. “But I’m just getting to know your girlfriend.”
“Another time.”
Something flashes across his expression, and I think I see his jaw clench, but he just smiles and nods, tipping an imaginary hat to Marlene and the others before spinning, his arm around me forcing me to turn too. We start walking back towards the castle, and I look over my shoulder as we go. Marlene is watching me leave, and I give her a half hearted wave.
“What the fuck was that?” I snap as soon as we’re safely in the Slytherin common room. Regulus and Evan look up from where they’re sitting on a sofa, blinking at us.
“Whatever do you mean, Dorcas?”
“You know perfectly well,” I hiss, glaring at him. He looks so fucking pleased with himself as he flops down on the sofa next to Evan, a hand immediately going to the other boy’s thigh. Evan glances down at the contact, his jaw working for a moment before he schools his face back into passive interest in the conversation. “Why were you being such a dick, Barty? That was a ridiculous way to introduce yourself to Marlene. It was brash and immature and –”
“What is it, exactly, that I did so wrong?” Barty sighs, tilting his head at me.
“It was the way you were so fucking mocking. Like it was all a big joke to you.”
“Darling, life is a joke to me.”
“Don’t take it too personally, Dorcas,” Regulus murmurs, his gaze focused on the book in his lap. “He’s been acting like a prick for days. Must be in one of his moods.” His eyes flick up to me briefly, expression blank. “Though I suppose you’d know that, if you’d bothered to pay any attention to us recently.”
I tense, fists clenching at my sides. I know it’s probably bad how defensive I’m getting. Means there’s truth to his words. “That’s not fair.”
Regulus shrugs, turning back to the book. “I don’t give a shit who you spend your time with.” Somehow, that hurts more than his jab before, and I know that was probably his intention. But it doesn’t stop the blow from landing.
“Hello? I’m still right here?” Barty scoffs, gesturing wildly with the hand that isn’t planted firmly on Evan’s leg, which I swear has moved even higher in the past thirty seconds. I redirect my attention to him.
“Is everyone just being an arsehole at the moment?” I demand, throwing my hands up in exasperation. Regulus hums noncommittally. Evan clears his throat, meeting my gaze a little hesitantly.
“Well… you have been quite preoccupied with Marlene these past few weeks. I guess it’s just… we miss you.” Barty rolls his eyes at Evan’s words, but I decide to ignore it.
“I still don’t get why you’re mad,” he huffs. “I was perfectly friendly.”
I groan, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Y’know what. Forget it. I’m going to bed.”
Our group has arguments like this all the time. We’re overdramatic about the littlest things, blowing up at each other and then pretending like nothing happened the next day. By the time I wake up tomorrow, it’ll all be forgotten. A comfortable routine. The reassurance that none of us actually hate each other. Not really.
***
1977, February 8th - Evan
Barty has his tongue down another random girl’s throat. Again. I’m not generally the jealous type, especially since I have no right to be jealous of Barty. But this feels extravagant. I can’t help but feel like his behaviour the last few days has something to do with what we did. A targeted attack. A display to show how little it meant to him. Because that would be perfectly on brand for Barty Crouch Junior, the boy who cares about nothing at all.
I don’t realise how tightly I’m gripping my fork until the edges start to dig into my hand. I tear my gaze away from where Barty’s hand is placed a little higher than necessary on the girl’s leg, where his mouth meets hers over and over.
“Annoying, isn’t it?” Regulus drawls, and I glance at him. He’s smirking into his mug as he takes a sip of tea. “People being so disgusting in public.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, okay, point taken, Black.”
“I think it says something that it bothers you so much,” he says lightly, setting the mug down next to his food, which he’s barely touched for all of breakfast.
“Oh, do you now?” I grumble, skewering a piece of fruit with my fork aggressively enough that the metal hits the plate.
“Mhm,” he hums, watching with faint amusement as Barty’s hand slips just under the girl’s shirt. Not far enough to be anything indecent. But enough to be suggestive. “You care, Ev. That’s what he wants. Surely you can see that.” I don’t reply, so Regulus just continues. “I’m sure you’ve realised it’s just to get to you. This endless cycle of people, a new one every morning and evening. He wants you to notice. To get jealous. Because then he won’t be the first to show that this thing between you two actually matters. Even if he doesn’t realise that’s his intention, subconsciously, it is.”
I opt to not think too hard about his words, instead dodging the implications with a trusty sarcastic remark. “When did you become such an expert?”
I don’t think I imagine the faint smile that flits across Regulus’s lips. But it’s gone so fast, replaced by his usual apathy, that I can’t be sure. He shrugs, leaning back in his seat with his head tipped back, closing his eyes.
“I don’t really care if you choose to ignore it, Ev. In my opinion, the longer this drags out between you two, the more time I have before I have to deal with lovesick idiots all the time.”
I clench and unclench my fists, gritting my teeth against the onslaught of retorts building in my throat. I fight the urge to deny his claims. It won’t do anything. Because if there’s one thing that’s true in his statement, it’s that Regulus really doesn’t care about the relationship between me and Barty. He cares about us, of that I’m sure.
But romance – or lack thereof – has never been Regulus Black’s forte.