His purpose
Barty hates his name. It’s a shit fucking reminder to have every day of the only thing he hates more than his name, his father. He’s an extension of his dad, that’s all. Bartimus Crouch couldn’t even be bothered to properly name his son.
So it’s no surprise to why he doesn’t bother to care for him either.
Its Pandas birthday, which means its Evans birthday too. The paper he’s writing on is ridiculously flimsy and small, as it’s rolling papers shitly stuck together, that Bartys using to send a birthday message to the twins with.
He would use proper card normally and a fancy quill but his father has cut off his paper usage, due to a small fire barty tried to start last Christmas with a sheet of A4 and the unoccupied fireplace.
He hadn’t wanted to burn the house down, not with his mum inside at least, he’d just wanted to cause a fuss. A bit of attention. Plus, it was Christmas day and shit always goes down, in the crouch household, on Christmas.
It’s practically tradition.
In Bartys house they don’t do holidays like most families, discounting the fancy, stickup-their-arses pureblood household like Reggie’s or the Rosiers. Because Barty has heard tales from both his friends about Christmas in their families and honestly its fucking horrific and far too sophisticated to ever be Bartys cup of tea.
Though a lot of the violence and drama makes up for the regal aspects, in his eyes.
But in Barty’s family, birthdays don’t exist unless it’s his mothers and every Christmas are a pathetic façade and opportunity for his father to make a political statement to the press in light of the “festive spirt”.
Merlin. Fucking kill him.
He has gone through 18 makeshift cards as the Rizlas keep bloody ripping. he scribbles on the paper trying to make his usual shit handwriting actually neat and delicate.
Unlike anything else in his life that is.
Dear Pandora
Dear Panda
To Evan
To rosy,
Dear Ev
Dear my favourite twins,
Dear Rosy and Pands
To Rosy and Pandora.
To Evan and Panda,
To Evan and Pandora,
Dear Evan and Pandora,
To Evan and Pandora,
Have the best
To Rosy and Pandora
To Rosy and Panda,
Haps birthday,
Your favourite person ever,
Barty.
P.s ignore the paper. Bartimaeus Sr has cut me off aka the cunt won’t let me burn anything.
Evan had left last Thursday and they go back to school on Tuesday because Mondays a teacher training day. Which means he’s stuck in purgatory for two more days, its hell because his father’s here but it’s also heaven with his mother.
Sometimes in the dead of night, when he can’t sleep, he wishes he had fucking killed his mother when he was born. Well he had for 2 minutes and 36 seconds, but he yearns for the reality in which she hadn’t been resuscitated. He likes to think his head was so big and full of knowledge it almost fucking killed her.
That’s why his father hates his, that has to be it, not the head bit, the momentarily killing his mother part. Barty doesn’t know for sure that that’s why but what else could he have possibly done. He ruined his mother; he made her meek and scared. So, his father hates him for it, for taking away such a good person, someone his father loved. To be replaced with himself such an awful person, who his father hates.
If she had died Barty thinks it would be easier and he wouldn’t have to live in a house with 2 ghosts, his father, a breeze of disciplined neglect and his sweet mother who walks a tightrope balancing him and his dad.
His mother is so quite Barty thinks she must believe the smaller she makes herself the less his dad will prioritise her and instead put his own fucking son first.
Flesh of Flesh and Family doesn’t matter when you hate someone so much you can’t even look at them, when you hate someone the way Bartimus Crouch Sr hates his son.
Barty feels as if his whole life is a desperate plea to get his father’s attention, he’s given up on getting respect or even love. He just wants his father to look at him and not see the wall that he is stood in front of.
Please he wants to say just look at me and see what I have created. What you have ruined but what I fucking made.
Because that’s what barty is. He’s ruined and self-created all at once, he’s a monster built of other people’s limbs. He never really met his parents growing up, not there personality’s not their beliefs or morals. A major part of his parents shut off from him, locked away. He never learnt who they love or what bands they like or their favourite food is or what they do in their spare time. He wants to know who they were when he wasn’t there, to ruin his mother and then his father and then to let himself be ruined.
He doesn’t feel like he ever got a chance.
His parents raised a shell.
So, he took others emotions and quirks and engrained them into himself. He had never felt anger before Hogwarts, never experienced it, so when he did it was like a baby crying for the first time. When he first felt friendship and security, he clung to it, he will do anything for those people because they are the only ones he ever had.
He is still learning what is right and what levels he has to use.
He still learning his emotion like a fucking child.
When he feels emotions caused by others, he lets them burn him as he runs with these feeling letting them fill the hallow space within him. Evan has called him a kleptomaniac before and fuck if only he knew. If he knew how he had taken of Evan Rosier’s traits and how they were now engraved into Barty.
He has messily cut off parts of others and borrowed them to sloppily sew onto himself.
He sent the birthday message by the family owl and imagines Evans faces as he reads the last line. He will probably smile and hopefully he will laugh.
He can’t quite feel anything better than Evan Rosier’s laugh, it swells such a strong emotion in him that he can’t place, he hopes one day he knows enough that he will. That he will be able to look at Evan and say what it is he makes him feel.
The quirk of the lips is the first sign Evans going to start laughing, the creases that form by his mouth and then as he’s shaking with amusement, he puts a hand over his mouth as if he were trying to compose himself but it never works it just makes Barty snigger. Leading Evan to laugh harder.
If his one true purpose in this ridiculous life was to make Evan laugh, he wouldn’t be complaining, as Bartys thoughts fall away from his parents and softly drift to Evan Rosier he can feel himself slipping into sleep. So instead of wishing death and pathetic feelings he falls asleep thinking of Evans laughter.
The first Tuesday in November was freezing, like ball-freezing cold and it also happened to be the day barty needed to get the station to catch the express.
The bus ride from Whitehall to Kings cross is only 15 minutes and the walk is 45 so it’s no surprise that he didn’t want to drag a trunk and broomstick across London. But all Barty has is 3 stray cigarettes, his bundled up Slytherin tie and a near dead lighter in his pocket, a helpful collection for when he got to Hogwarts yet for the bus fair to the station, they were going to be no help.
As it turns out even with the upper body strength barty has from being a beater for Slytherin he still finds it hard to drag 20 pounds worth of clothes and text books for 45 minutes.
He was definitely running late, as per usual but as he handed his trunk to the lads who uploaded the bags into the train, he found he still had a good few minutes to spare roaming the slim corridors of the Hogwarts express. Peering into one of the carriages he spots a roomful of Gryffindor girls lounging, probably waiting for the trolley to come around.
Fuck off.
That wasn’t any old Gryffindor that was Sirius “brother abandoning” Blacks’ friends and in between the girls he spots a head of long, flowing hair he knows to well.
“Pandora,” he says sternly, traitor he thinks.
Her head snaps up, “oh barty you made it.”
Yes, he bloody made it, just in time to see pandora dick ridding some Gryffindors. He can feel himself just stood there, as he raises an eyebrow. Barty sees when the realisation clicks for Panda because she fucking giggles.
“We were just talking,” she says. If she were Dorcas, she would tell him to stop gaping at her like he had just walked in on them having an orgy or something like that.
But because its pandora she just nods with a head tilt and says, “did you have a nice autumn equinox”.
He lets his face fall for a second to sarcastically bob his head as if he is thinking of an answer, “yes, yeah my autumn equinox was fucking smashing Pands but care to explain the new change in friendship group!”
The Gryffindors are looking at him as if had just told them he used the killing curse on James Potter, meaning Macdonald and McKinnon don’t look at all impressed, actually they look a bit horrified and Lily Evans is just rolling her eyes as if she too heard the myth that Potter is immortal and may be believing it (Evan and him started that particular rumour, subsequently after smoking a lot of weed on an Wednesday when potter survived a fall from at least 200 meters in the air during the quidditch match earlier that day).
Panda giggles and does that horrifying look where it makes you feel as if she is searching your soul, “don’t worry I haven’t, I just needed to talk to Lily Evans about divinations, they moved me up a year for that class.”
“Since when?”
“I wrote to you about it,” She says, “did you not get my letters?”
“Cunt face must have hidden them,” Cunt face being his dad, of course, Barty says trying to sound casual. But he can’t help the pathetic slurry of excitement that bounces around his chest at the thought his father even remotely cared enough to think of him.
Stupid he thinks.
“Well,” he says clapping his hands together, he see Evans jump at the noise or perhaps it’s just because its him whose making it, he certainly does have a reputation at school of not only being slag but also for having rather violent, aloof tendencies and protective instincts when it come to his friends, “So glad you had a lovely chat with the girls about a bullshit class, but perhaps we best be off”.
He gives her a manic grin that he hopes says, hurry the fuck up I want the see your brother and the rest of our friends not some morally conscious Gryffindor’s who are bumfucking Dumbledore.
Though that is a rather long message to put into a smile, he’s getting good at eye emotion communication plus its Panda she can probably read minds. He read once that enough psychedelics can give you that power and Pandoras dropping some kind of drug at least 2 maybe 3 times a week with her open relationship boyfriend and infamous drug dealer Xenophilius Lovegood so… mindreading seems highly likely.
She grabs her wand and slips it into her homemade wand-holder that is decorated with woven yarn and purple and pink crystals.
Very Pandora of her.
As she waves her goodbyes and what sounds like re-establishes, with lily, that she will sit next to her in divinations, Barty mimics under his breath the coo of “bye pandora, bye Lily, bye pandora, bye Mary, bye Pandora, bye Marlene”.
He really does love Pandora and would kill the whole world, well not Evan, Regulus or Dorcas, for her but sometimes he just wants to keep moving not have a pow wow with the Pointer Sisters.
They start to walk back down the corridor.
“Why are taking divinations if you think it’s a bullshit class?” she phrases it like a question but he knows it will either lead to 201 more questions or a silent nod in response as she rested his head on his arm.
“One my father hates the lesson so thought I should be well educated on it for family dinners,” lie. They don’t do family dinners anymore; his father gave up the idea of an opposing politician spying on them to see if he really had the “perfect family” he portrays. He lost that particular paranoia after losing the election meaning they also lost the mournful meals , barty had a particular hand in that vote to make sure his father wouldn’t win, just to get rid of the family dinners.
“Two, I liked a girl in that class when we picked our newts,” true. He had liked the girl, Felicity Hughes, he had dated her for a week then realised he had no real feelings, like usual, and told her it was over.
“Three its easy,” also true. Though most classes were a breeze for him.
Pandora sighs, “divinations isn’t just about the future, it’s also about the present and today is beautiful, the earth is beautiful, meaning so is divinations”
“Don’t let Reggie hear you say that,” Regulus has a profound hatred for the subject, he told Barty why before something about the Greeks and how when they found out their future it always ended in doom so that meant regulus or anyone else should also not know.
Pandora wraps her arms around one of Bartys so as they walk her head lolls into his shoulder as she suppresses his laugh, “he still hasn’t cut his hair.”
“Fuck right off,” Barty says laughing like a madman, “he’s really going for the long haired self-sabotaging poet aesthetic, hey`’
“It’s not long,” she says grinning, “not like he-who-shall-not-be-named”.
“Reggie isn’t around we can use Sirius’ name you known.”
“Hush! He could hear you!” she cackles, trying to put her hand over bartys mouth, which he promptly try’s his best to fight her off, but she’s stronger than she looks in that 5,2 body of hers.
Leading to a scuffle of them dragging each other to their normal train compartment through bouts of laughter and stupid insults from her and great comebacks from him, or at least he thinks their great.
He manages to slid the door open while in a headlock and he makes eye contact with Dorcas first then he looks over to Evan who promptly bursts into ridiculous laughter.
Dorcas is slapping her knees and cheering Pandora on. Even Reggie is chuckling, Regulus who had once described their friendship group as “the only civilised people in Hogwarts” and was now most definitely wrong about his statement.
And stupidly all Barty can think is, it doesn’t matter if his house is purgatory, he’s never felt more alive when he’s with his family: Regulus, Dorcas, Evan and Pandora. They are his present and his life. His whole fucking Earth.
Though only Evan Rosiers his purpose.