Work Text:
One.
Barty was an awkward child, with shoes that were too shiny and a tie that was knotted a little too tightly around his neck, growing lopsided as he tugged on it throughout the day. He had been at Hogwarts for a month now and had yet to make any friends. How could he possibly hope to? His fellow Slytherins all seemed to be part of the same social circle his father despised, and the other Houses didn’t see much more than the green tie.
Maybe that was why it felt so much like the tie was strangling him.
He sat by the window, his History of Magic textbook open in his lap, not actually reading it as he stared out into the depths of the lake. A school of fish swam past, a grindylow in hot pursuit.
“Cool, isn’t it?” asked a voice.
Barty turned sharply, his eyes narrowing. There, just beside him, stood a boy near his own age, though not one of his fellow first-years. He would recognize him, if that were the case. The boy had pale skin and dark hair, a scrawny frame, and soft facial features. He smiled and extended his hand.
“Regulus Arcturus Black,” he said.
“I’m Barty. I mean…” Slytherins were particular, weren’t they, about things like names? “Bartemius Crouch Junior. But please just call me Barty.”
He extended his hand to accept Regulus’s, shaking it.
“You’re a first-year, right?” Regulus asked.
Barty nodded.
“Well, congratulations,” said Regulus, taking the seat across from Barty. “On making it into Slytherin, I mean.”
That wasn’t the sort of thing Barty would’ve expected to be congratulated on. But Regulus seemed to be very sincere about it, and Barty managed a smile.
“You’ll like it here,” Regulus assured him. “You’ll fit right in. Otherwise, the hat wouldn’t have sent you to us.”
He said us like it meant something, like Slytherin was more than just a dormitory, a Quidditch team, a group of classmates. Like Barty had been welcomed into some sort of elite club.
“Is that for Binns’ class?” Regulus asked.
Barty nodded.
“It’s actually pretty interesting,” he said. “Better to read than to listen to him talk, anyway.”
Regulus grinned at him, and Barty knew he had found a friend.
Two.
Barty’s father had lost his mind. There weren’t enough hours in a day to take twelve classes. But he absolutely insisted, so while his classmates started two or three new classes, Barty found himself lugging around five new textbooks, struggling to complete five new sets of homework.
The one saving grace was Regulus.
Regulus was taking Ancient Runes. He was taking Arithmancy. He was a year ahead in all the core classes, and, somehow, he was willing to spend his free time studying with Barty.
Studying might not be the right word for it. Tutoring might be more accurate; Barty was definitely getting more out of it than Regulus, who wasn’t a third year anymore and didn’t need to review the third year curriculum. But his father wouldn’t like it if Barty admitted to needing tutoring, so he wrote home that he had found a friend to study with, and that was that.
They didn’t just study together. They talked, too, more than they ever had before. Regulus told Barty all about his family, about their generations of pure blood and their barely-secret love for the Dark Arts.
“Your family must be the same, though,” Regulus said. “After all, you’re a pure-blood, too, aren’t you?”
Barty thought of his parents and grandparents, all of them with the same sort of magic that he was still learning to use.
“I think so,” he said tentatively.
“What was your mum’s name before she married your dad?” Regulus asked.
“Edgecombe.”
“A really old family, and it’s been generations since any of them married below their status. They count as pure-blood, I think. And your father’s family is Sacred Twenty-Eight.” Regulus tilted his head to the side, looking at Barty curiously. “You didn’t know that?”
Barty shook his head.
“My dad says it doesn’t matter so much,” he murmured. “He says the only really important thing is that Muggle-borns need to fit in and follow the rules. It’s how people act that matters.”
“That sounds like something a blood traitor would say.”
Despite his words, Regulus didn’t look upset. He was smiling at Barty, his eyes shining with mirth, an unspoken sentiment in his curved lips and lighthearted tone:
Isn’t it ridiculous? You don’t agree with him, do you?
“Being a pure-blood is a privilege,” Regulus said after a moment’s pause, “and a responsibility. Only a fool would say it doesn’t matter.”
Barty nodded, fully prepared to agree. After all, he was not a fool, was he?
Three.
By Barty’s fifth year, Regulus had long since stopped talking to Sirius, deeming him a blood traitor not worthy of his time or attention. At least, around everyone else, that was what he said. To Barty, he was more honest, admitting that he still missed him, that a part of him wished he had never left.
He told Barty all sorts of things now that he wouldn’t admit to just anyone. That he hated his Great Aunt Cassiopeia. That his oldest cousin was starting to teach him serious Dark Arts. That he found men more attractive than women.
“Me, too,” Barty replied. “No judgment from me. That’d be pretty hypocritical, wouldn’t it?
“It won’t ever amount to anything,” Regulus said. “My parents will want me to marry a pure-blood woman.”
Barty looked at him shyly, reaching out a hand to touch his cheek.
“Wouldn’t you like to know first what it’s like to kiss a bloke?”
Regulus’s face flushed, and he gave a tiny nod. Barty leaned in and kissed him on the lips.
It doesn’t mean anything, they told themselves. It’s just temporary. Just for right now.
And it would be. Even then, they knew that, and they weren’t wrong. Not entirely. Neither one of them would ever marry a woman, but it would be only a few years now before they had their last kiss and then never saw one another again.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Four.
As the Hogwarts Express chugged along, Regulus charmed the windows so that nobody passing by would be able to see into their compartment. With careful fingers, he rolled up his sleeve. There, on the bare skin of his forearm, was something like a scar or a brand - or, if one was being generous, a tattoo. Tattoo was probably too nice a word for something that looked like it had been burned into his skin.
“Is that…?”
“Yes,” Regulus breathed. “I got it over the holidays. Brilliant, isn’t it?”
Barty’s eyes gleamed as he looked down at it. He reached out to touch, but Regulus snatched his arm back.
“No. Sorry. Nobody can touch it. He’ll know.”
Barty looked at him with wide eyes. Regulus was smiling.
“It’s better than you could possibly imagine,” he said. “We’re really doing something that matters, Barty, something our parents could never dream of! And the Dark Lord is… well, I couldn’t possibly put it into words, what he’s like.”
He paused, then, in a soft, almost hesitant voice, he added:
“I could put in a good word for you, if you wanted to join. Make sure they know you’re not like you’re father. That you’re one of us.”
Barty nodded. Of course he wanted to be one of us, if us included Regulus.
Five.
A hot summer’s day. Barty sat with Regulus on the roof of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, dreading the moment when he would have to Floo back to his parents’ house. Dreading even more the day in the not too distant future when he would board the train to Hogwarts one last time while Regulus stayed behind in London.
“Why couldn’t we just be in the same year?” Barty grumbled.
“I didn’t see you complaining when I was helping you with your O.W.L.s,” said Regulus. “I’d have been too busy with my own, if we were in the same year, wouldn’t I?”
“Yeah, but still.” Barty shrugged. “It won’t be the same without you.”
Silence fell over them for a moment.
“How are the Dark Arts lessons going?” Regulus asked at last.
Barty grinned.
“Brilliantly,” he said. “Your cousin’s incredible.”
A feeble smile formed on Regulus’s lips, but it faded very quickly. He looked at Barty in a way that Barty couldn’t quite place. There was hesitation, certainly, and nervousness, and perhaps something like sorrow.
“If I asked you to run away with me, would you?” Regulus asked. “Just leave it all behind, just the two of us?”
Barty stared at him in confusion.
“Is this about your parents trying to find you a wife?”
Regulus shrugged.
“That sucks, but - Reg, you know you we can’t, right? The Dark Lord would never allow it.”
With a grimace, Regulus nodded and let the subject drop. They lingered in each other’s presence for another half hour before Barty looked at his watch and, begrudgingly, said that his father would notice if he stayed out any later.
He gave Regulus one last kiss and then vanished through the flickering green flames of the Floo.
By the next morning, Regulus had disappeared.
+One.
It was cold in Azkaban. It was always cold, the sort of cold that was unbearable, dressed in threadbare prison robes with no cloak, no blanket, no wand to cast a warming charm. But Barty doubted any of those things would have made a difference, anyway. This was a cold that transcended the physical, a cold that left frost and icicles on one’s very soul.
Regulus was not there. Not even in Barty’s memories, because his memories of Regulus were mostly happy ones that seemed far too distant to have ever been real now, in this cold prison cell, with the dementors draining away anything good.
But he remembered waiting for Regulus to return. Pacing in his bedroom, waiting to hear from Bella or Rabastan when they found him. If they found him. Sobbing into his pillow the night the Dark Lord told them Regulus was dead.
He had ways of knowing. But Barty still could barely believe it was true. How could someone like Regulus just be gone?
Bella insisted that the Order had gotten to him: kidnapped him, tortured him, taken his life. But other people whispered that he had panicked and tried to run. Barty preferred to believe the former. After all, it was Regulus who had convinced Barty to join the Cause. Barty knew he had believed in it wholeheartedly. Why would he ever want to escape from something he had been so enthusiastic about?
And yet, in one of the few memories of Regulus the dementors did allow Barty to hold onto, they were sitting side by side on the roof, the last time they saw one another. The night Regulus vanished.
“If I asked you to run away with me, would you?”
Barty wondered what might have happened if he had said yes.