Love...
Breakfast.
Barty has no good memories of breakfast.
He is sure he must have had one good one, but his mind likes to hide those from him, especially when he is stressed. And Barty is very fucking stressed.
Yesterday in the dorm when… what happened happened he… well he… he isn’t sure what quite happened.
He remembers Evan’s lips being an inch away from his, and he can recall the urge to close that gap. He hadn’t and to be frank he was rather glad.
It was one thing to want to kiss your best friend. It’s a whole other being actually doing it.
Yet it’s all he can think about, during potions and then in break and DADA and lunch and Runes and Charms and then again during dinner and when he was lying in bed resisting every urge.
The very urge he hadn’t resisted after Evan had left the room proceeding there near kiss.
Barty rarely feels ashamed of anything he does, but as he sits next to Evan on the bench, eating toast, he can feel the shame dripping down his back like thick, hot tears.
He doesn’t think he has said a word all morning, Dorcas had thought he was coming down off something. That’s just how silent he has been.
He can’t seem to get his words out, it’s as if they are lodged in his throat.
Fuck.
He lets his head slowly slide down and gently rest of the wooden table. The cool timber grain is pacifying against this headache of a situation.
He can hear the beating of wings and the small squawks of the owls. The sound is followed by thuds against the table. There so many packages landing that he can feel the vibrations against his forehead.
Barty doesn’t bother lifting his head.
He won’t receive any mail. He hasn’t in his 6 years at this school.
There’s the sound of laughter and ripping paper, and then suddenly there is silence.
A second of such deathly sound that he’s sure even the owls have stopped there shrieking and have settled.
He lifts his head ever so slightly and looks down the table, there at least a dozen beady eyes staring at him, like a murder of crows.
The noise is restored by soft footsteps and even softer sobs as a small girl is walking away from the Ravenclaw table. Barty can’t see her face, but by the sounds and the way several other girls start to chase after her, he can assume she is crying.
He doesn’t bother lifting his head any further, in fact he considers putting is back down.
Someone will be dead, killed by deatheaters in their beds. Perhaps that girls’ little brother or sister, perhaps her mother, father, aunt or uncle. Maybe even a grandmother or grandfather. Maybe even a great grandparent.
Either way someone is dead. And Barty dislikes it, of course he does.
But then again someone seems to be deceased at least once a fortnight, dead people seems less like bodies of the loved, and now there more like corpses, rotting and cold.
These deaths roll in like the tide and then out again the very same.
Barty has never felt loss, not like that. He has never had someone warm and gently in his reach and the next day they are dead.
Maybe because he never has had anyone warm and unconditional. His family seems to be lukewarm like bathwater that had forgot to be drained.
He looks at Dorcas, she is looking right back at him with such intensity that he sits up a little straighter.
She doesn’t say anything, instead she just slides the newspaper over to him.
He lays the print at on the table and reads the title: Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Bartemius Crouch, speaks out on the dead of Niall Ridley, aged 9.
There’s a swirling photo of his father on the front, his mother is sat there too.
Barty’s eyes shoot to the article, he horridly skims every line but specific phrases are searing and standing proudly out, “Violence can only be fought with violence”.
His father wants to kill the deatheaters… he’s letting Aurous use unforgivables.
That’s probably why the Slytherins had been staring, they were watching for his next move. To see if he shall rejoice or burn.
This is the pinnacle; does he surrender his mortal soul to Dumbledore and martyr himself on a cross forged by his father or follow his friends into hell and hang on a noose tied by his own hands.
He can feel laughter building in the back of his chest threating to escape. What else can he do?
He stares and stares at the paper, and then one sentences catches his eyes:
Another sweet boy butchered by monsters.
Anothersweet boybutchered bymonsters.
Anothersweetboybutcheredbymonsters.
Another sweetboy butcheredby monsters.
Another sweet boy butchered by monsters.
Another sweet boy butchered by monsters.
Surprisingly the word that catches is ‘sweet’.
It’s so simple, so innocent, so very good.
A nine-year-old boy was ripped apart and he was sweet.
His father had said that. Sweet.
His father had called a butchered child sweet.
Barty can think of another nine-year-old boy who had sat half dead, curled into a ball, his back torn to ribbons, and he does not believe anyone thinks that child sweet.
He thinks of the nine-year-old, cold and bleeding, wishing for someone to release him of his pain, yet the only person he can whisper to is not replying.
He can remember the blood like honey, healthy and sweet, soaking his clothes. He had lied there so long it has become sticky and tart. Something had turned sour inside him.
He was nine years old and decomposing like a mouldy, forgotten apple in the bottom of a ceramic bowl. He had only moved when his father need to go back into his office.
How could you hurt a little child?
How could you hurt your child?
No one thought he was sweet, not when his bones could be seen jaggedly through his skin or he when he passed out in runes after the long summer holiday from starvation. Not once did they think him good when he felt like his own body was eating itself just too survive, not when his back was only raw flesh as all the skin had been licked away with a belt.
No one thought him good.
Or honest.
Or brave.
And Gods no, did anyone think him ‘sweet’.
Even if he had died, who would know he had. Barty didn’t meet anyone who would remember him till he was 11. Except Alice, that is.
The Slytherins are still staring with fury and so are the Gryffindors, its burning holes into him he can practically feel it. There anger at him seems to be the only thing they have agreed on.
They hate him.
All for being his father’s son.
One side think his father wants to kill their family and the other think he wants to kill their families.
He has this innate desire to look up and cry, to sob.
To shout.
To hold up his shaking hands and make them believe they are clean of this child’s blood.
The red that is stained onto his palms is his own.
He wants to turn his hands and show how his knuckles aren’t coated in crimson or broken; he has not fought. He wouldn’t dare.
The blood he is swallowed in is his own, it has been there since birth, he never had anyone to wash him clean of it.
But they won’t believe him, because the one person who could prove his innocence is the same man condemning him. His father.
And he fears the urge to stand up and shout and say his piece, to convince people of his view is far too much like his father.
So, he stays sat, staring at the paper, the photo of his dad stares back with all the mercy of an executioner.
The edges of the newspaper are crumpled where his hands had curled into fists.
Barty scrunches up the print further into a small jagged ball of anger.
His eyes don’t meet anyone’s gaze as he lets his wand fall into his hand from his sleeve and then he stares head first at the old, grey headmaster. He sends the small ball flying into the air.
Not breaking eye contact, he swiftly lifts his wand and shouts, “Bombardo!”
He can hear the echo of several cheers and laughs as well as gasps and shocked cries, but Dumbledore doesn’t look surprised instead there’s a glint in his eye as if he had expected Barty to do exactly what he had. Barty had this overwhelming feeling he had just been moved like a pawn of a chess board.
Dorcas was shouting at him, which considering she had been ignoring him for the past five days, since the article had come out and Barty had lit it on fire, was a significant improvement.
“So, you have chosen your side,” she says sharply.
They are stood in the dorm, face to face, and Regulus and Pandora are sat nonchalantly on one of the three beds, not even bothering to watch.
It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that they know who will win… and let’s just say there are no bets on Barty’s name.
“No, it was a stance against my father!” It’s true that he doesn’t want to kill any muggles or muggleborns, the only person he has any desire to brutally murder is his father.
“A fucking stance, you prick,” she cries with such ferocity Barty thinks he might be bleeding from just that tone alone, “it was a statement!”
“It really wasn’t, Meadows, you’re just thinking to deeply into it.”
“I’m thinking too deeply into it am I? Don’t patronize me, Crouch,” she says shaking her head and stepping closer to him, her wand pointed at his chest, “you want to kill anyone whose blood isn’t pure, well mine isn’t, cut me open and see if it’s as dirty as they say!”
She points the wand at her own chest and harshly grabs his hand putting it to her wand. Barty hears the squeak of the bed and he just knows Reg and Panda are now going to be watching.
“Fucking kill me!” she gutturally bellows.
“I don’t want to kill you!” He says back as he tries to let go of her wand but her hand is anchoring his to it.
“Course you do,” Dorcas says, “that’s what your little stance said.”
“It wasn’t about muggles,” he says.
“Yes, it fucking was!” she says, “anything you do is, because your pure blooded and rich and safe and you have everything you ever want, a door is never locked to a person like you!”
That snaps something in him, because what would she know about his safety, his wealth, his life. Clearly nothing if that’s how she sees him.
“You don’t know anything, that much is obvious.”
“I know exactly who you are, Crouch, and everyone is getting so sick of you pretending to be the victim.”
Oh.
His heart hurts.
She continues, “I have worked for everything I have ever had; I am a black, halfblooded witch and because I live in a world like this, I am going to die because of it.”
She isn’t shouting anymore; she just sounds tired as if she has been saying these words for centuries.
And because he is all the things she thinks he is, he replies with, “you suffered, well done Meadows, do you want a prize, because we all have suffered. You’re not special.”
He hears the smack before he feels it.
Her eyes are cold and unforgiving, he doesn’t except them to be anything else because she is Dorcas Meadows and she does not do or say things if she does not mean them and she would never apologies for something she does not mean.
The left side of his face is burning and he can feel a small trail of blood running from his cheekbone.
She steps closer once more, and he can practically see her brain turning, finding the harshest thing to say, “This is not your tragedy, it is mine! You are not nearly as hurt as you wish you were, you’re not nearly as important or damaged. You’re the bad thing and no one and I mean no one will ever be as big an enemy to you than yourself. Every time you do these cruel, hateful things I understand more why your dad hates you and I understand less why your mother doesn’t.”
She lets his hand drop from where she was holding it and steps back. She is waiting for him to react, he realises. But he can’t….
He can’t do anything.
He can’t breathe right. Or wrong.
The slap had hurt less. Everything he despised about himself had been said by the person he trusted the most, by one of the people he loved the most.
He would kill anyone who hurt Dorcas and yet he had hurt her.
He was stuck between pointing his wand at her or lifting it at himself.
But he couldn’t do either, both proved her point. Either he agreed with blood supremacy or he really was a pathetic, narcissistic victim.
He has never hated himself more.
Not only because he hurt Dorcas but what if he had made it up, what if he was the manic son or the psychotic best friend or the evil student.
What if his father was good and he was hurt? What if Barty deserved it?
How could he tell if everything was not as nearly bad as he thought it was? It would explain why no one cared. Why no one had sympathy for him. Why no one understood.
What if he only hated his father because he was so full of hatred.
What then…
His breathe feels caught in his lungs and the overwhelming need to cover his ear and whisper ‘I’m okay’ over and over again felt more profoundly useful then breathing.
But he doesn’t. He stays stood, hands by his side and his eyes are focused on the girl in front of him.
The sides of his throat ache as if they are closing.
He can’t fight back or speak. He can’t protect or defend himself. He can’t retaliate or argue. All he can do is stand like a pillar of doleful sadness.
And as he thinks of how he is now, unmoving and unspeaking, he almost laughs because perhaps he is more his mother’s son than his fathers.
Is this how she feels, scared, guilty, incapable.
Does she feel hurt by the people she loves the most because her silence has hurt them.
He walks past Dorcas clumsily; his chest is still tight and weighted. His legs are weak and his fear palpable.
There is only one person he can bare to talk to right now and they just so happen to be in a place he definitely isn’t welcome.
He is stumbling and walking in a very not Slytherin way, he has no ego or elegance in his steps.
Stumbling and walking.
Walking and stumbling.
He briefly recognises Professor Slughorns office and even though it is past curfew he does not bother to duck his head out of sight.
Stumbling and walking.
Walking and stumbling.
The corridors are empty, Miss Norris isn’t even about. The cobbled brick rushes past him in the moonlight.
Stumbling and walking.
Walking and stumbling.
His feet are climbing dizzily on the moving stairs. Barty finally reaches the portrait, and its only then that he realises he has no way of getting in. He could wait and ask a student but his reputation exceeds him and he can guaranty he will be told to fuck off.
Fuck.
The tears in his eyes are threating to fall. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Just…
He hates himself so fucking much. Dorcas hates him. Pandora must, Regulus too. And Evan… Evan will, eventually.
There his best friends, Merlin they are his family. He is about to turn around and walk back down to dorms but the door swings open.
A gaggle of younger girls skip out. He slips past them into to Gryffindor common room. At first, he thinks they hadn’t noticed him but them he realises there gossiping had stopped. As he turns, they are all staring at him, like geese, their eyes are wide and their necks shot forwards in surprise and outrage.
He didn’t think he could defend why he was sneaking into the Gryffindor common room due to the large lump in his throat and the tears that where threatening to fall. So instead of sticking around for the interrogation, he slides past the door as quickly as a snake.
The room is bright with candle light and joy, the complete opposite of what he is used too. The Slytherins common room is dark, the only light being the blue-tinged glow of the sunlight shining through the lake. All the furniture is made of leather or snake skin. Barty finds that rather ironic, to have a group of students commonly called snakes and then to dress their home in the skin of there emblem.
There are groups of scattered students littering the room, draped across sofas and hanging out of windows as puffs of billowing smoke emerges from there muggle cigarettes. Not one of them seem to have noticed him yet, he’s not surprised they are all clueless idiots that lack any common sense let alone a brain cell.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” He recognises that voice, Sirius Black. He has a dark coal smudge around his eyes, eyeliner, Barty realises. Black eyeliner trying to be someone he is not. Maybe he thinks it will make the Gryffindor’s love him more. If he is eccentric and brave then maybe they won’t see past the eyeliner, into the pale blue of his eyes that are a typical Black family trait.
“Always so charming, Black,” Barty says, it comes out cleaner than he expected, perhaps having a go at this inbred (he swiftly apologies to Reg in his head) wanker shall help him through his breakdown.
“Get out,” he says sharply.
“I need to speak with someone.”
“Thought you didn’t humble yourself by associating with us lot?”
“I can’t tell,” Barty says, just to be a prick, “when you say your lot are you speaking of muggle-lovers or Gryffindor’s.”
“Get out!” Sirius demands, pointing at the door.
“No,” he replies, he breathing is easing and while he has no really desire to hit someone at this very moment, he never misses an opportunity to swing for Sirius.
“Who do you want?” a confident voice says, he looks over and sees a flurry of red hair, Lily Evans.
“Alice,” he says, he hadn’t forgotten how Lily had helped Pandora on Halloween so he wasn’t about to be a cunt to her, “Fortescue,” he adds.
Lily looks around the common room then says, “I’ll go get her.”
There are a few people who start to say Lily’s name, trying to get her attention. Only one of them actually catches her notice, Potter.
Potter hadn’t said anything yet, strange. Usually he is the first to pipe up and be the knight against the ‘evil’ Slytherins.
“Are you sure?” Potter says, his glasses are off and he looks so different Barty almost didn’t recognise him.
“Yeah, Lily, James is right we don’t know what he wants with her,” Sirius chimes in.
“I’m sure he just wants to talk to her,” she says, then turns to him.
Barty realises that she is waiting for him to confirm his motivations, “we are just looking for a blood traitor for our evil, deatheater sacrifice.”
Lily rolls her eyes, while he hears several others gasp, she clearly understands a joke. She’s a smart girl.
She runs up the stairs, to get Alice presumably.
“Does being an absolute cunt get you off or something,” Black says.
“Not necessarily,” Barty replies with a malicious tint and a gruesome grin, “just the normal stuff, you ‘know dead bodies, animal or human, any kind really, doesn’t matter to me.”
“You’re a freak,” Sirius says, and Barty thinks this might be the second time in one day that someone points a wand at him.
“And your histrionic child, who never got what he wanted so now you will do anything to get attention,” Barty says, he puts his hands in his pockets as he sways gently. He tilts his head as he utters “it’s pathetic really.”
“You’re such a pretentious prick, ‘histrionic’, who even uses that word,” Sirius says with a slight smug look on his face.
And well Barty can’t let Sirius think he has the upper hand, “many people know the word, although I suppose you must have lost some of your good vocabulary when your mother was bashing your head off the floor.”
Silence. He had known the whole common room was watching but he didn’t care, now you could hear a pin drop.
“Barty?”
He quickly turns, and there is Alice.
He hair is shorter since the last time he saw her, it suits her.
She walks up to him, her eyes maternally searching his body, checking if he is hurt. That’s usually why he comes to her, a broken nose or a black eye typically means a call to Alice.
“What’s wrong?” she asks quietly, placing a hand on his upper arms gently. She wipes his cheek and he realise she is getting rid of the blood from Dorcas’ smack. She is the best person he knows, when his mum was to sad or empty to take care of him Alice was always there.
“Nothing, I just wanted to talk,” he replies.
“Ok, ok,” Alice looks around then says, “let me just tell Frank.”
She waits for him to nod before turning back to the stairwell entrance. Frank is stood in the doorway, his hands on his hip like a British dad.
Barty nods to Franks in greeting and he responds the same. Barty surprisingly likes Frank, he is always calm and gentle and always too good but Barty doesn’t mind.
Frank’s father also worked at the ministry; he had seen how when Barty turned 8 he stopped coming to the family events at work. He had seen how Barty had been erased from his father’s life, only to be seen in pictures where he couldn’t misbehave. So, he also understood what Alice meant to Barty and vice versa.
“Alice,” Sirius says with wide eyes, “how the hell do you know him?”
Black’s eyebrows are furrowed in genuine confusion and it takes everything in Barty not to laugh.
Alice turns, her bobbed hair swishing as she moves, “we used to go to church together.”
Barty is pretty sure Sirius’ head is about to explode. Black is staring at him, “you went to church.”
“We are both Italian.”
“So?”
“We are catholic, of course we went to church.”
“Should we go?” Alice asks as she walks back over to him, he doesn’t even need to ask where they are going. Every time they need to talk, they go to the same place.
“Yeah,” Barty says and lets Alice take his hand as she drags him away.
It normally takes a good 2 minutes to walk to the greenhouses but during curfew, with Filch and the prefects lurking, it takes at least 10.
By the time they are sat on the dusty floor, looking at the stars through the glass roof, he has completely gotten over the Dorcas thing. But he didn’t feel like telling Alice that he had dragged her away from her boyfriend, late in the evening, just to get over the thing he wanted to talk to her about.
Barty’s emotions seemed to act like this, just like the deaths, they washed in and out like the tide.
Alice knows that, she knows everything about him. That’s why they talk about feeling and the stuff they could never tell anyone else.
She knows he doesn’t understand his feelings or emotions but she doesn’t care. Alice lets him talk through them till he feels better, till he feels less stupid and child-like.
She says he spent so much time learning everything else as a child, just never how to process his moods. All he has is a sick and twisted imagination and that has to count for something.
“So?’ she says turning to him, her eyes are kind, as always.
“Um…” he mumbles.
“Don’t tell me your going shy,” she laughs and nudges him.
He simply, falsely smiles back and when she notices that he isn’t laughing the grin falls from her face and she says, “whats wrong? Share it with me, you know I don’t mind holding half of your problems, God knows you have half of mine.”
He finds himself smiling as he buries his hands into his hair and looks at her. He doesn’t know what he was going to say but he definitely didn’t expect what came out of his mouth, “I nearly kissed someone.”
Alice’s eyes widen and then she burst out laughing. She put her hand over her mouth as if she is trying to repress the cackling bounds of laughter, “sorry, sorry, that just caught me off guard.”
He can feel his face flushing, “please for the love of god stop laughing, I can’t believe I just said that.”
“No!” she says quickly, sitting up properly so she is facing him, she says, “it’s good you told me, thank you for telling me.”
“Yeah, your welcome,” he says rolling his eyes.
“No, I am being serious,” she says and he can see the earnest in her eyes, “so what about a near kiss has you so frazzled.”
“I… I don’t know, it’s less about the kiss and more about how I felt,” he confesses.
“How did you feel?”
“Like... as if… like familiar, as if it’s been there forever, like a gentle pounding,” Barty tries to explain, “as if me and… them are made from the same soul.” He gentle rubs his chest as he speaks.
She doesn’t interrupt him; she knows not too when he is like this. When he is working through his emotions, she knows he will get there eventually.
And only because its Alice he tells her his deepest thoughts. She is the only one who would understand.
“I still can’t believe God, not like we were meant to, not unconditionally, but I believe in them unconditionally. I want to worship them and hate God less for it because God made them.”
Alice is only one who gets how God has made him feel unkind and unlovable. How a being who loves all his children had left Barty, when he was just a child, crying on his father’s office floor bleeding out. And how that had ruined him.
Barty thinks of Evan, it seems to be all he is doing recently. He thinks of the notepad they have full of funny things they have said while high, his personal favourite being, ‘little, angry fairy inside Johnny Rotten trying to sing its way out’.
Barty thinks of Evan’s face when Dorcas plaits his hair and how it’s the same look he has when he is invested in a piece of homework. He thinks of Evan’s shoulders and ribs, his thighs and knees, his eyes and mouth. Barty wants Evan to be everywhere with him and nowhere without him.
“There can’t be a universe where I don’t know him and if there is, I feel so sorry for that other version of me, because I know they have not laughed or danced like I have in this one, I know they have not loved like I do in this life time.”
“Well that’s it then,” Alice says and he can swear there are tears shimmering in her water line.
“What is it?” he asks.
“You said it, you know what it is,” she says with a forgiving smile on her face, “Love.”
“How? How can I love?”
“I know you, your just like me,” Alice says, holding his hand, “When I met Frank, I thought I can’t love him, because I don’t know how to, not yet at least. I felt like my heart wasn’t broken enough yet to be fixed.”
Barty looks at Alice with everything he has and whispers, “I feel like my hand isn’t hurt enough to be held.”
“You don’t need to be hurt to be good, and it doesn’t make you bad if you are, I promise. You deserve everything lovely. Love shouldn’t come with a condition.”
Mm… what a foreign word. Love.