Barty had met Regulus and Evan just a couple hours ago, having sat together on the Hogwarts Express after making it very clear to them that he was a pureblood. Despite that having been the only reason they chose to sit with them, Barty rather liked the pair, and he decided he wanted to be friends with them.
Now they were all trying to fall asleep, away from home for the first time. As Barty tosssed and turned for what seemed like the hundredth time, a voice rung out in the darkness.
"Do you know any horror stories?" Barty grinned. His sister used to tell him horror stories all the time.
"I heard there's a ghost that lives here, at Hogwarts. It wants to purify the castle and picks off first years, one by one." Barty tried to imitate the creepy way his sister told it, striking every nerve in his body, but he couldn't get it quite right. "It has a hiding spot no one knows, and comes out every night, roaming the castle to find first years out of bed." There was a short silence from Regulus and Evan. Then Regulus delved into his own story, about a woman who, driven by jealousy, killed her husband and fed him to his secret lover. They were submerged in silence once again before Evan spoke up.
"I once met a man. He told me he was nervous, yes, nervous. Not mad, certainly not mad. He knew this man, a man with a horrible blue eye. It was terrifying, it would tear straight into your soul. He knew there was no other remedy than killing the man with the blue eye. He had decided he would do it a couple days before I spoke to him. He didn't act any different, he was perfectly courteous to the man. Didn't cause any suspicion. Crept in late that night, taking half an hour to open the creaky door silently, another hour to stick his head in. But the eye was closed. How was he to kill this man if his eye was closed? His eyes was the despicable part of him. The digust wouldn't come. He couldn't do it. So he left." Evan continued the story, telling them of all of the man's failed attempts, until finally he saw the eye open and managed to kill the man, before the police came over and his heart beat so loud he confessed.
Barty didn't sleep that night, kept awake by a heart-like pounding and the image of a bloodshot, blue eye.
The tradition of telling horror stories continued throughout first year, and Evan outdid the other two every night. Eventually, it stopped being a time for them all to share their stories, and Evan adopted the role of the story-teller.
He told them of madmen and murderers and deceiving old men and suspicious widows. His ideas never seemed to run out.
Slowly, his stories turned from horror to thriller, to mystery, to adventure, to romance, and they all mixed and mingled amongst themselves. As they grew older, his stories grew longer, and he would often tell them along the course of a couple nights, sometimes a week or two.
He wove masterpieces, stories of every genre, with every sort of character, with every sort of plot. He spoke of a boy named Holden in an unnamed city being expelled from his school and spending days alone, wandering around, his parents unaware of his expulsion. He told the story of an exiled man who forgot his parents, and then killed his father and married his mother, having children with her before realizing his horrifying mistake. Then he told them of his daughter, and her fight to bury her brother. They spent several nights following the story of four teenagers like themselves, stuck in a complex love square, with amortentia and a troublesome house elf giving everyone the wrong potion. Several more were spent with a boy and a girl, deeply in love, but with families that despised each other. Then a rather comical week was spent with a muggle who believed himself a wizard and tried to imitate Merlin.
They all had their own favourite story.
Regulus's was the one about the pair of siblings taken by a witch. She wanted to eat them, but the siblings worked together and escape. He always got a nostalgic look on his face when Evan would tell it, and while he didn't say anything, it was rather evident who he was thinking about.
Barty's was the one about the teenage boys at Hogwarts from a couple decades ago, who used to sneak out to read poetry to each other in a cave. He liked to imagine a world where he was carefree enough to wander around the grounds, looking for hidden nooks to read in, and spend time with his friends.
Evan loved to tell the story about the warriors who sieged a city. He followed the story of two of them: one of them nearly invincible (all but his famous heel), the other a weakling, wearing the one's armour. He never got through the story of their deaths without crying.
The first night of sixth year, Evan refused to tell them a story. He said he wasn't in the mood, he didn't have any inspiration. They asked him the next morning what was wrong, and his gaze drifted to his left arm. He didn't say anything, but they dropped it. He didn't give any explanations when he started up again in October.
The stories turned darker. They turned into stories of oppression, of hatred, of injustice. They turned more raw. Unjust imprisonments, irrational hate thrown at someone for unknown reasons. People killed for how they had been born, mocked for their beliefs, their heritage, their traditions. A girl trapped with her family in a house hidden behind a bookshelf. A boy and his brother who fled the country alone, taking trains and hiding from the police. A boy whose whole family was murdered for looking different.
He would stop for weeks at a time, telling them he was too tired to think of any stories. Barty and Regulus were too exhausted themselves to worry about him.
He hadn't told a story for three weeks when Regulus told them he would be going out on a "short errand". When he didn't come back that night, Evan told his last story. It was about a girl in a red hood who brought pastries to her grandmother. Barty was sure there used to be a wolf somewhere, but it was never mentioned. It was shorter than usual, and much more lighthearted than anything he'd told since sixth year, but it was a decent enough distraction from their friend's absence.
They had more important things to do, after that. They devoted themselves entirely to the Dark Lord, to finding the bastard that killed their best friend, and giving him the slowest and most painful death they could manage.
Devotion, hatred, and vengeance settled deep into his heart and shot out with each curse he hurled at Moody. Evan covered his back as his eyes darted around, looking for an exit. Why weren't there any? They couldn't win this fight, they were outnumbered and weaker. They needed an escape plan. If Evan could provide just a momentary distraction, he could apparate both of them out of there.
"Bee, careful with your-"
A flash of green.
Barty fell asleep alone that night, and the silence had never been louder.
He realized as he woke up the next morning, alone for the first time in eight years, that he would never again hear Evan whisper another story, laughing or crying under his breath, struggling to get the words out. He would never again catch Regulus's eye during a story, both of them staring at Evan in awe at the way he wove his words together, creating beautiful tapestries every night. He would never find out where Evan's true inspiration came from.
Or at least not until years later, when he would be browsing his father's library and would find a compilation of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. Not until the moment when he would read The Tell-Tale Heart, and would realize that it was the same story Evan had told them that fateful night during first year. Not until he would find The Catcher in the Rye, Oedipus, Antigone, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hansel and Gretel, The Dead Poets Society, The Iliad, Don Quijote, Anne Frank's Diary, Un Sac de Billes, Petit Pays. Not until he would realize that his friend had been crying out for help. He'd been crying out for help every night seven years, and no one had heard him. He'd never believed the cause he was fighting for, the cause he'd died for. And now that Barty had finally heard him, it was too late to save him.