No one ever said life was full of happy endings. No one ever said it would be this hard.
They know her by now. Aside from the cursory inspection and customary wand confiscation, they wave her on through. Expressions carefully blank, movements ever so slightly stilted. She knows it's insane. Knows that they whisper behind her back, lips curled in amused sneers, eyes glittering with condescension.
It doesn't matter. He's there now, ahead of her, and her steps quicken, rushing her to her accustomed spot just inside the door. He doesn't move when she comes in. He never does. His eyes stare dully at her, his body carefully sat up against the opposite wall. He's so thin, her heart clenches. They don't feed him enough, they don't take care of him enough. If it was not for her weekly visits, she knows it would be even worse.
The Healers say that his soul will return 'any day now.' Harry's destroyed all the dementors and what no one knew, what no one realised, is that doing so set free all of those souls they'd devoured over the years. Burst them all like pinatas, to coin a Muggle phrase. But some people have taken longer than others. Some people may never regain their souls, so decayed and withered, it can never reconnect to a body.
She's desperately afraid his is one of them.
She doesn't know when she fell in love with him. She'd never seen how he properly looked until one day in Azkaban, when she was going about her occasional rounds as a Mind Healer, dealing with the criminals who newly regained their souls. Then she saw him, slumped over on the straw like a bag of mouldy laundry, and asked her mentor who he was.
"Bartemius Crouch Junior," the woman told her with a brisk, haughty sniff. And like that, she is lost.
She remembers him, of course. How can she not? He pretended to be a DADA professor for a whole year. He is the one who placed Harry's name in the Cup. Enabled You Know Who to rise once more.
And yet despite this, she cannot bring herself to hate him.
His personality shone through when he taught them, although she doubts he was aware of it. The cheeky grin he flashed when no one could get the answer (well, nobody but her, that is). The way he licked at his lips, like a cat after a succulent bowl of cream. At the time, she thought she was going mad, being drawn to a grizzled ex-Auror with a magical eye and a stump for a leg (not that there was anything wrong with such things, of course, but she'd been fourteen!).
Now, she sighs and leans ever so slightly closer, her fingers brushing the jutting bones of his ankle, trailing upward over the cold, ashy skin toward his knee. She doesn't dare do more than this, although upon at least one occasion, she has had the audacious temerity to smooth his hair back and kiss his forehead. His skin had felt like ice, and she'd despaired.
Her friends are starting to talk, starting to question why she returns to the wizard's prison over and over, and she has no answers. The brightest witch of their generation! Condemns herself to one evening a week in this dreary, torch-lit cell, watching over a prisoner with no more thought in his head than an empty sack. A man completely bereft of personality, of mind, of soul. She watches him, straightens him when he falls to this side or that, talks to him of her day. Her week, her life, her studies.
They have all begun to revolve around him. Of what to do with soul-emptied prisoners, how to find them, how to guide them back into the crumpled husks of bodies. How to accustom a person to the world they have suddenly woke up in, gasping and torn. She hears them around her sometimes. A few have been released from Azkaban, changed men and women, but many haven't. Their anger rattles the bars of their prisons, making her jump in her self-imposed solitude.
She sighs and brushes his hand with her fingers one last time as she rises and prepares to leave.
And for just a moment, his fingers squeeze back.