Challenge: Maria from Ravenclaw's The Person Before You's OTP Challenge, on the HPFC
Characters: Regulus Black, Bartemius Crouch Jr.
Prompt: the darkest night
Word count: 1,274
A/N: It's my understanding that R.A.B/Barty is Cheeky Slytherin Lass's OTP, which Maria verified. This is also my first time posting a challenge. Anyway, I've never considered these two as a pairing before, and given the instructions to write about them, I had very little idea what to do. But it's a pairing that, in canon, is doomed, so I stuck with that, given the prompt from Maria. It certainly made this easier!
"My master's plan worked," he whispered, coaxed into doing so by the unyielding coercion of Veritaserum. "He is returned to power and I will be honoured by him beyond the dreams of wizards."
He felt his lips stretch into an insane smile, contorting his features painfully and grotesquely before he lost consciousness. He was oblivious to the disgust of the departing headmaster, and the conflicted fear of the Boy Who Lived, and the cruel silence of the Potions Master could not have meant less to his frayed mind.
Minutes passed and consciousness returned, not that he welcomed it at all. He did not acknowledge his guardian, the stern-faced, tight-lipped transfiguration professor. His interest was instead fixed behind her, on the Foe-Glass he had stolen when he abducted Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody earlier in the teaching year.
Interestingly, though the surface wasn't a real mirror, he could see his own face staring back at him. Wide brown eyes and dark freckles filled his milk-white, deceptively old, face, weathered by events instead of the passage of time, all beneath a mop of straw-blond hair. Though barely in his thirties, Bartemius Crouch Junior had suffered more than many other wizards.
He had committed many crimes in his time, dozens of unforgiveable offences that he had never expected to really care about. Who honestly believed that the torture of the Longbottom couple was his first and worst crime?
"No one," a familiar voice murmured, and Barty's eye twitched in the Foe-Glass. He glanced sceptically around the room, but none of the dark detectors were alert at all: there was no one there. No one, at least, who wished harm to the paranoid retired auror, the one who had been taken away.
"Oh, Barty," the voice crooned, "what have you let them do to you?"
"Impossible," he muttered, his gaze jumping frantically around the room. The woman standing guard over him paid him no mind as he did so: he was bound by Dumbledore's spell to the chair on which he sat, and so posed no threat to her. "Nothing's here. You can't be. You're dead."
"Ah, so you do know," the soft tone sighed, and then, all of a sudden, he was right there.
He didn't look a day over eighteen, which made sense. He'd never been a day older. His ink black hair, dark as the darkest night, framed his pale face, as haughtily handsome as his surviving brothers'. He was small and slight, built like a seeker, though he'd only ever played chaser on the Slytherin house team. He was wearing the same thing he wore in all of Barty's memories, the usual attire of the Death Eaters during their revels. Usually, the memories incited a rage inside of the Dark Lord's most loyal follower, one that he had always been forced to repress, for fear of the punishments he'd in payment for breaking. Now that he was free to react how he wished, though, all he felt was a soul-crushing misery.
"You aren't real, are you?"
Regulus shook his head slightly. "I'm just inside your head, Barty. Sorry."
"Hm."
"You never had to take it this far. You could have stopped."
"Don't be foolish, Reg. I never had a choice."
"You could've chosen never to follow me."
"But you're my friend. You helped me find who I was in school, find an identity I could like, one I could define. Father hated me, couldn't stand the disappointment I've always been to him. But you were just like me, and your parents both loved you so much."
"I was nothing like you, Barty. You know that. You'd never let yourself slip like I did, the night before I died."
Regulus Black finally stepped in front of Barty, allowing him to see him more easily as they spoke. Brown eyes met black as the shade and the man remembered how Regulus Black, pride of his parents, had breached a hundred of the unspoken rules of the pure-blood elite of the English wizarding community.
He told the truth, for one, and that alone broke a dozen rules. If one respected their bloodline, they didn't let anyone who wasn't immediately related know what they were feeling. Hell, they didn't let outsiders know they were feeling. It complicated things, handing over power to someone else, especially if it didn't come purely from owing them some kind of loyalty. The truth was especially avoided if it involved one deciding to betray the loyalty of the most powerful dark wizard of the modern era.
It only got worse when a wizard from a well-respected, known and feared line of prestigious pure-bloods kissed his best friend. His male best friend. On the mouth. After confessing to plotting against the Dark Lord. And plotting a way to end his immortal reign.
And also, the wizard he kissed? Yeah, he liked it. He liked it a little too much. He was just afraid to admit it.
Bartemius Crouch Junior was afraid of many things, back then. He was terrified that his father was disappointed in him, that he would fail the Dark Lord and be punished. He was frightened of change, of showing his fear, and of upsetting his mother, who loved him unquestionably. And he was afraid of damaging his relationship with his only friend.
Knowing all of this, he did what any sane man would do: he told Regulus that he needed to think. He asked him to come back the next day, and then Regulus left, apparently understanding.
Barty never saw Reg again.
"I would have said I loved you back," Barty finally whispered, his voice cracking it had when he seventeen years old and realised that his best friend was never coming back.
"I doubt it, Barty. You were too afraid of what it would mean for your life."
"I could have worked it out. You did. You and I were the same, we did everything the same."
"We didn't follow Him for the same reasons. You did it because I did. I did it because it's what my parents wanted, my mother especially, what with how much Walburga loathed muggle-borns."
"Mudblood filth," Barty recalled, earning a glare from McGonagall that went unheeded. He laughed without humour. "I remember."
He sat in silence for a while, staring at Regulus, trying to commit his features to memory. He had a horrid feeling in his gut. He associated this particular dread with the darkest nights of his life, locked away in Azkaban with a thousand dying men, more haunting Dementors, and nothing to think about but his own regrets. Nights in the wizard prison had always seemed longer than they actually were, waiting for a dawn that always dawned grey and cold.
"You know what's coming," Regulus breathed.
"Dementor's Kiss," Barty nodded solemnly. "No more regrets."
"No more you."
"I really did love you, Reg."
"I'm just a figment of your imagination, Barty. I don't exist."
"But I did," he insisted as the door crashed open, Cornelius Fudge bringing the icy, joyless sense of a Dementor with him like a shadow in the night. "I swear I did."
Regulus vanished, along with any hope of the last member of the Crouch family living - or wanting to live. What was the point, when he had no one left to live for?
The Dementor came closer and Fudge's muffled orders were lost among McGonagalls' shocked shouts of protest. Bartemius Crouch Junior only heard one last thing before everything ceased to concern him. He knew it couldn't have been real, but the voice came to him nonetheless, and comforted him.
"I loved you more than anything."