A/N: Written as a challenge about conflicted characters and as an off-the-forum challenge by a friend to write Barty Jr/Regulus, since I'm always complaining how no one writes about them often enough. They're pretty awesome.
Anyway, enjoy.
His eyes betray him. Flecked amber set into a softened childish face, they appear much older than his eighteen years. He sits, slumped on a sagging and tired looking couch, tufts of his straw-colored hair swooping over his face and casting shadows. His hair has always added to his overall puerile look, choosing to sprout in every direction possible, always unruly, always untamable. But his true story flashes across his eyes. They dart up to meet mine, unsurprised by my unannounced visit. "Reg," he grunts, and his silence starts my heart beating in a frantic drumbeat against my ribs. His silence terrifies me more than his normal manic twitch, than the words that bubble out from him never endingly. Barty is never silent; he hums constantly with energy, a game of Exploding Snap one second from bursting in your face, a firecracker always a blink away from ignition. His silence is heavy, a warning.
"You've been staring at it again." I say, my words feeling awkward and stumbling. "I don't like it when you stare at that thing all the time. It's not healthy."
He laughs, a harsh and hollow sound echoing from his throat. "Health, Regulus," he says. "is probably the least thing on my mind." Golden eyes wander to his shirt sleeve, and with pale hands he rolls it up to reveal the scar beneath. "I felt it burning." he tells me, eyes still focused on the inky serpent crisscrossing over his skin. The thing makes me cringe. Snakes are always surrounding me- above my head, on my arm, hissing behind my eyelids when I sleep… "Did-" he pauses. "What's wrong with you?"
I take a shaky breath, and my lungs fill with ice crystals from the frozen air permeating around us. "I… I just came to see you. Am I not allowed to do that?"
Barty's chest collapses in a deep sigh. "Don't be stupid." He hops up, the couch releasing a protesting groan, and wraps his arms around my waist in a tight embrace. He's always been the short one.
My lungs feel tight as I close my eyes, sinking into his arms and holding my breath. "Nothing's wrong," I whisper. "I just came to see you."
His voice is low, growling- Barty looks like a Crouch, but his temper has always been Black. "Don't you dare lie to me, Regulus. I know you better than that, and I know people better than that, and this is how people say goodbye."
There is a pressure tightening behind my eyes, stretching and tearing as I dam back back the hot tears threatening to burst, because I don't cry. Not around Barty. Barty screams, Barty shouts, but he doesn't cry. "Not goodbye," I mutter, but my words are consumed by his mouth as he closes his lips over mine.
Barty kisses like a dementor; sucking and breathing you in. His hands are in my hair, leaving a trail of tingles and chills where they touch. Barty doesn't kiss you; he possesses you. I know the others can practically smell it on us, see the more than accidental finger brushes, but Barty doesn't give a damn. Barty takes the lead, and I can only follow, because that's just how Barty is. Barty is mad. His mind jumps from one idea to the next like flashes of lightning, a storm of thoughts whirling and colliding in his head. He is desirous of everything at once; when we were eleven years old I asked him why he had wanted to be in Slytherin. For some people, your destiny is a choice, not dictated by your gold plated name on the family tree and the purest blood rushing through your veins. For some people. Barty told me he wanted to be the best. I asked him at what, and he told me, simply, that he just wanted to be the best. At anything. At everything. Barty is desirous of everything simultaneously; Barty never yawns or hesitates but only burns, burns, burns and it's all I can do to keep up.
Shadows. I have my eyes shut tightly. Colors and stars dance in the blank canvas behind my eyelids, smears of purples and blues from the pressure. His breath is against my face, warm and alive in the freezing air.
I can never keep up with him.
I graze my fingers up his arms until they reach the raised skin under his shirtsleeve where his skin is marred by a Death Eater's résumé. He grunts because it's burning. His has been burning more and more lately. We try not to talk about what he wants us to do, but the question always manages to come up. "What does he want?" I say.
"Doesn't matter," he answers, and draws me in for another kiss, but his body has gone rigid in my arms. He's concentrating on the white hot fire searing up his arm, focused on not crying out from the pain.
I want to ask "Why did we do this?", but the words stay buried in my throat. But the answers are always present, floating unsaid in the air. Why we're where we are. Why I have to do what I have to do.
Because my whole seven years at Hogwarts my father sent me four letters and they were all on office stationary.
Because it comes with the name. Because this is Black family bonding. Because…
Only one thing matters anymore, and the thought is drowning me. I pull away. "Barty…"
His face twists into a lopsided grin, his eyes shining with more than the reflection of his fireplace. "You're so dreadfully predictable, Reg. Are you going to tell me what's wrong now?"
My fingers dive into my pocket and close around a cold object. A shiver runs down my spine and my stomach churns sickly at its touch. Shaking, I pull it out and into the light.
A locket, emblazoned with a green 'S', an emerald serpent coiling around its surface. "Salazar Slytherin's," I say.
He shows no reaction, but then I see it- a sudden flick of the pink snake of his tongue flits over his lips, screaming blatantly of his nervousness in a half second. He fears the locket. "So?" he says, his voice as steady as ever.
Another dart of his tongue slithers over his lips, and a swell of anger surges through me, bringing the blood to my face in a hot red bloom over my cheeks "You knew," I say. "You knew this whole time what he was doing. You're scared of it!" I thrust out the locket, and he flinches, eyes widening.
His face relaxes into a soft expression caught halfway between a smile and a frown. "Regulus, my love, did you only just realize?"
He knew. He knew and he didn't tell me. He knew and… "How did you find out so soon?"
A slender finger taps his head and he nods, his misplaced tufts of hair dancing wildly. "Twelve O., remember?" He collapses onto the couch, sighing deeply. "Reg, Reg, Reg… he wants to live forever and he will cease at nothing to attain his goal. He's letting you look after that thing? Merlin, he must really trust you." His eyes are twinkling now, dancing with the reflection of the S. "If he trusted me so…" he stops, his head cocked to one side. "Let me see it, will you? It's beautiful magic, isn't it? Just beautiful." He snatches the locket from me before I can protest, and runs his hands over it with reverence. A V forms on his forehead as his eyebrows furrow. "It's not heavy enough. It's not… it's not the horcrux."
I shake my head, and my hair sticks to my face. I'm sweating. "Barty," I gasp. "It's sick. It's wrong. Do you know how horcruxes…" My words dry up in my cracked throat.
"Don't be daft, Regulus. Of course I know how horcruxes are made." His ravenous eyes flash to furious as he tosses the locket to the floor. "It's a copy. Why do you have a copy?" I watch as his chest expands and collapses at amazing speed and his tongue flicks again over his lips.
But I am frozen, my fingers blue and frostbitten with fear. I have more fear for telling Barty than for anything else I have to do. "Because it's wrong." I manage to choke out.
Barty doubles over and clutches his stomach as he hoots with a mad laughter that seems to shake the room. "Wrong? Regulus, when did you develop a conscious? It's a pisspoor thing to have for us. I don't even think about it."
"What?" I whisper.
"Right and wrong. Good and evil. All that shite. Power is what matters. You never seemed to mind last week when you Cruci-"
Rage flashes through me, quickening the pounding rhythm in my chest, thawing my fingers with its heat. "What's the point of it, Barty? All this fighting and bloodshed. In the end, what is it worth? People only end up dead. Don't you see what he's doing?" I gesture at the locket lying on the floor. "He wants to be immortal! What do you think we'll do when he's run out of use for us? We mean nothing to him. I don't know what we want. Blood purity, power… Merlin, it's just a fill in the blank question! He laughs at our goals. What he wants is so much more than us, Barty. Why can't you see that? He's playing a life size game of wizard chess and we're pawns at best."
Silence. A clock ticks on the mantle, each sound a deafening stab in my eardrums.
"Well," he says, his mouth twitching upwards at the corners. "That's why we ought to be of use, at least, of use in his eyes. Don't act as though I'm a bloody servant. You think I took this—" He thrusts out his marked arm. "so I could serve? I am not a pawn. I am a bishop. As you ought to be."
"A bishop," I say slowly, tasting the words as they roll over my tongue.
Another smile. "Bishops, Regulus, move diagonally, not forwards, and, consequently, often end up in places where kings don't expect them. Or want them." The words are slow and drop from his mouth like lead. "We need to be bishops if we're planning on destroying that thing. I assume you know where the original is?"
A gasp escapes my throat. "You aren't coming with me! I'm not having you do that!"
He chuckles softly. "That's because you know that you're going die. That's why you came to say goodbye to me."
Sometimes I hate him. I truly, truly hate him. "It's really powerful magic. He'll know it's gone. And where's it's hidden… I just know I'll…"
I expect him to shout, to fly into one of his rages, but he says nothing. He nods as though the action requires a mass amount of effort and sighs. "Heroism? Maybe you had more Gryffindor in you than your Mudblood-loving brother ever thought. I'm coming too, but you do realize that there isn't much point to being a hero if you end up dead."
A hero. I am not a hero. More often than not I find myself with both a corpse and the contents of my stomach at my feet with "my master"s rolling from my grovelling lips, acidic and burning. I am not a hero. My blood is Black, not the vibrant crimson of Sirius' Gryffindor.
The pause that follows lasts for years. "You aren't coming with me." I say, finally.
"Again, you're astoundingly stupid." he says. "Of course I'm coming with you. Whatever happens to us will happen to us together." He pulls me into another embrace.
Numbness spreads over my body. I can barely feel him against me. "I can't let you do this."
He looks up to me, his eyes wild with something only Barty Crouch Jr. possesses. "I'm afraid that you don't have a choice, Regulus."
I pull away, my fingers closing around my wand. "I'm afraid I do." My voice is so small, I doubt he hears it. "Petrificus totalus," I gasp out in a wobbling voice. I turn to Apparate away before the sound of his body thumping locked and stiff to the ground reaches my ears, before my resolve fails me and I undo the actions I have already set in motion. Before Barty Crouch can see me cry.
Salt stings my eyes, sticks to my lips. A wet wind whips relentlessly at my face, flyaway masses of my black hair obscuring my vision. The sea pounds against the rock, and the cold spray that hits me feels like death. Kreacher says something, but it floats past my ears on the winds. I am looking into the rolling grey of the endless waters. I am remembering…
First year, sometime around February. The Slytherin common room feels frosted over, and people's words smoke from their purple lips in little clouds. Barty is humming. Barty is always humming, always tapping, always making some sort of noise. At first it annoyed me, but now that we are into second term I have learned to tune it out.
The green light that dims the common room makes me feel nauseous. I never even liked green before being sorted into Slytherin, and now I was constantly being bombarded by it in every shade. I tried to convince myself that it was better than any garish type of red or gold or…
"Oi, Regulus?" says Barty. He's lying down by the fire, swinging his feet in the air like a little kid. His straw-colored hair is particularly unruly today, flopping in every which direction.
I look up. His white quill has ceased its furious scribbling over a Potions essay, and its owner looks up at me expectantly. A too-long green and grey scarf is hung loosely over his scrawny neck. "What is it, Barty?" I ask from my position nestled into a ball on one of the couches.
The fire bathes his face in an orange light. "I was only thinking…" he says, biting his lip. He begins to tap his quill in a constant rhythm on the floor. "What d'you want to do after school? My father wrote to me today." A scowl contorts his face.
"Where's the letter?" I ask, although I'm fairly certain of the answer.
Barty grins. "Burned it!" he says in a sing-song voice. "I'm eleven and he's already thinking about Ministry internships. I don't want a dull Ministry job like his. He's so boring, my father." Another scowl.
"What do you want to do?" I ask.
He cocks his head to the side, considering this. "I dunno! There's a lot I'd like to do. I thought about Dragon keeping. Or an Auror."
I try to repress the snort building up in my nasal cavity. Barty Crouch Jr., barely the height of a house-elf with a particularly bad hunchback, wants to be an Auror. "That's really difficult."
He points his tongue out at me. "I know that, Black! Don't be daft. I can do it, though. Especially if Father thinks that I can't. What about you?"
It's a pointless question. With Sirius in Gryffindor and snogging Mudbloods left and right, there's really only one option for the Good Black Son to do. "I don't know." I say softly.
Barty shrugs. "You're boring. Wouldn't it be brilliant if whatever we do we do it together?"
The idea makes me smile. Barty Crouch the house-elf and Regulus Black the good son, we'd be a team. "Yes," I say. "Brilliant."
"Is Master Regulus ready to go to the cave?" rasps Kreacher from beside me.
I fill my lungs with the chill of the salt air. "Yes," I say.
Wouldn't it be brilliant if whatever we do we do it together?
Brilliant, Barty. Brilliant.
All comments apprciated.