Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.
Note: The following one-shot takes place in an alternate universe where Barty Crouch junior is involved in somewhat different things from canon in the wake of Voldemort's defeat during his attack on the Potters on Hallowe'en, 1981. This story is rated 'T'.
The man who had taken and passed twelve OWLs walked though the shelves of stored prophecies in the Department of Mysteries, occasionally pausing to check his location as compared to the directions which he had been given, or to adjust his grip on the currently happy toddler whom he held.
Right now most of the aurors in the country not rounding up for trial those named as Death Eaters were out looking for him. They were probably looking for him in Guernsey, or possibly on the Isle of Man. They thought that he'd tried to assassinate the head of the auror office and fled after the attempt failed. Barty had certainly inconvenienced the head of the auror office, but hadn't actually made any effort to kill him – his intention after all had been to simply get the attention of as many aurors as possible and get them out of the country, chasing false leads, whilst he got on with his real errand which involved abducting The-Boy-Who-Lived (which he had done easily) and infiltrating the Department of Mysteries in the guise of another man.
Not that Barty Crouch junior could blame the aurors and the department of magical law enforcement generally for falling for his diversion. Nobody had ever bothered to pay attention to him before and to notice what he was capable of doing. Well not except for The Dark Lord and his followers. Nobody else had ever noticed how clever he was.
Not even his own father, so wrapped up in his government career, had ever bothered to pay attention to young Barty.
Well, perhaps Barty's mother had given him attention, but she'd been about the only one who had, and she'd been too stupid to see just how clever he truly was. Barty had wanted appreciation from someone his intellectual equal or superior. His mother's devotion to him was touching, but not very satisfactory.
He wanted recognition.
Well he would almost certainly have it now. Even more so, when those out looking for him realised the false-leads which they'd been chasing were just that – false leads.
Barty had been tempted to be slightly less subtle with those leads – to be more in-your-face with just how blatantly misleading they were, so that once they tumbled to the fact of their falseness those chasing them would feel extra-stupid. However, he needed to be sure that he wouldn't be distracted, right now, and so many aurors being elsewhere would only help in that. This was a real game, with high stakes. Barty had been due to take the Dark Mark, but the war had ended. Now Barty considered himself a guerrilla fighter against the victors, fighting on despite the fall of his lord.
Hence seizing The-Boy-Who-Lived.
Barty had realised within a few weeks of Hallowe'en that the muggle-loving Dumbledore could only hide The-Boy-Who-Lived with his filthy muggle relatives. Dumbledore was psychologically incapable, with Sirius Black in Azakaban, of doing anything else. And once he'd had that revelation, it had not taken Barty long to track down just where the disgusting muggle relatives of Lily Potter lived – although it had exposed to Barty just how out-of-date the muggle studies course at Hogwarts that he had taken had been. (Still, Barty had been clever enough to work around the developments which the muggles had made to their telephone system, and such advances as the advent of computer technology and the development of police radios.) And then he had been temporarily stymied by all that powerful magic which Albus Dumbledore had put in place on the house in Privet Drive – well, stymied until he realised he could simply employ muggle criminals to go in and snatch the Dursleys and Harry for him.
Barty needed The-Boy-Who-Lived for one reason – he had to find out if this was the child that the prophecy referred to and if so, what the rest of the prophecy said? Once he knew that, he could decide on what course of action (if any) to take next.
Barty had disguised himself as Remus Lupin for the purpose of abducting Harry Potter. The mild-mannered werewolf was the only one of the former friends of James and Lily Potter, whose appearance might not alarm Harry and whom Barty had been able to get close enough to to collect sufficient hairs for sufficient hours' worth of polyjuice potion. The disguise also doubled as useful for infiltrating the ministry, since he obviously couldn't look like Barty Crouch junior, would-be-assassin-on-the-run – and it saved on messing around trying to disguise Harry too, to instead simply look (to any witch or wizard who knew the Potters) like someone who might reasonably be expected to have Harry for an afternoon.
The toddler had certainly seemed to recognise him, calling out urgently 'moo-ey' almost as soon as Barty had arrived at the lair of the criminals who'd abducted the Dursleys and Harry for him. The criminals, of course, thought that Barty (physically disguised as Remus Lupin) was part of a two-man team who had hired them (the other being himself undisguised by polyjuice). It amused Barty to think of the sand that he was throwing into the aurors' eyes, if and when they ever became involved in investigating the Dursley abduction.
From the way that The-Boy-Who-Lived had seemed desperately pleased to see 'moo-ey', Barty could only assume that the Dursleys (as he'd have expected of muggles) were not treating Harry at all well, and he certainly wasn't finding it a problem (in Remus Lupin's form) to keep the toddler manageable.
Barty paused at a particular shelf, noting the inscription next to a particular ball.
"Look Harry." he said, flicking his wand at the glass sphere in question making it glow and shimmer rainbow colours. "A pretty toy. Can you reach it for me?"
He didn't know if Harry could understand or not, but the toddler obliged him by reaching out and grabbing the prophecy sphere.
Since Harry wasn't obviously struck dead or insane upon contact (Barty had researched how prophecies were protected most carefully) it seemed safe to say that the prophecy in question did indeed refer to him.
Whilst Harry clutched happily at the shiny, musically reverberating ball, Barty conjured up a replacement sphere, which he put on the shelf, so that nothing would obviously seem amiss to a casual inspection. He inserted a very special message into the fake prophecy orb, to wait for anyone who should ever happen by to examine it properly.
Barty carefully adjusted his grip on Harry, and blinked what were (for now) Remus Lupin's eyes.
"Now, let's go back to my place, Harry, so we can play with it and have some ice-cream." Barty said.
He liked to try and stick as close to the character, as he imagined, of the other wizard, when he was wearing their guise.
A couple of hours later, enlightened as to the contents of the full prophecy, Barty Crouch junior had concluded that it was a prophecy which was full of the utmost (and most dangerous) nonsense, and disposed of it accordingly. Barty had taken divination at Hogwarts and knew the subject inside-out, and it was quite clear that there was nothing in this particular prophecy of the slightest use to his lord when the day came that he would (inevitably) return and rise again in triumph. And an examination of Harry had convinced him that the boy showed no signs of any unusual powers, and that his lord's demise must have been the fault of the adult Potters.
And then, all things carefully considered, he took Harry back to the lair where the Dursleys were being held.
Barty had been clever enough to give orders that the Dursleys were to be unharmed in his absence, against their possible future usefulness – well that, and it fitted with the 'ransom' story, he'd given the criminals abducting the Dursleys and Harry in the first place.
"You can turn them loose." Barty said to the criminals. "Everything's sorted out, like we agreed." He extracted a small gold bar from a pocket, and placed it on the table, before their greedy eyes. "Your part of the deal." He turned his attention back to the Dursleys. "My apologies for this intrusion Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, but the price of your freedom has been sorted out." He gave a particularly wolfish smile. "You can take your son – and your dear nephew of course – and go."
Barty was reasonably certain that the cruellest thing which he could do to Harry Potter right now (including in that assessment the possibility of killing him outright) was to send him back to live with these muggles. Especially after today.
"I know you!" Petunia said to Barty. "You're another of those freaks who hung around with James. You're the smart-alec one, Remus!"
"Oh, but as my colleagues here would tell you," Barty said, indicating the muggle criminals, and taking the chance to sow yet more confusion and potential hatred for the future, "I much prefer to go by the name of 'Gellert Grindelwald', partner-in-crime to 'Albus Dumbledore'. Good day to you ma'am."
There was one thing which Barty Crouch junior had overlooked when he (still in Remus Lupin's guise) abandoned Harry back to the fate of the tender mercies of the Dursleys – the Dursleys had been in the same room as their abductors, and had seen the gleam of gold. From this, Vernon and Petunia deduced, since the man they saw resembling Remus had removed Harry from them for a short while, and returned with aforementioned gold, that Harry was actually worth money and that it was possible to access it with his assistance. The Dursleys were not in the same league of brilliance as Barty Crouch junior, and the notion that the gold might have come from his own pockets (or at least from a Death Eater emergency fund) never occurred to them – and they dismissed the idea that he might have 'magicked it up' on the slightly haphazard basis that he wouldn't have needed to remove Harry for several hours to do so.
Consequently, whilst Barty Crouch junior was off leaving rude messages for the aurors, and preparing to commence an epic hunt to discover what had happened to his master the Dursleys (cut loose by their abductors) were preparing to commence a hunt of their own for the suspected 'Potter gold'…
It wasn't as if Dumbledore had left them anything in terms of financial recompense when he dumped Harry on the doorstep, although hadn't that Remus/Grindelwald fellow behind their abduction said that he was working with a Dumbledore?
Maybe the pair of them had had a falling out, and Remus had extorted money from Dumbledore, or gone behind his back or something?
The important thing was that Dumbledore hadn't paid the Dursleys so much as a penny, but there was clearly some sort of money involved in this business, that the Dursleys hadn't yet been cut in on…
Author Notes:
And that's it for this one-shot.
Just to clarify the situation with how Barty Crouch junior represented himself to the muggle criminals, when he was not using any disguise, he called himself 'Albus Dumbledore', and when he was using polyjuice to look like Remus Lupin, he called himself 'Gellert Grindelwald'. He was only ever in a room with the muggle criminals in one of these guises at any one time.
On a minor note, Barty Crouch junior never got as far as receiving a dark mark in this universe. That might have something to do with how he wasn't detained, or maybe he put his plan into action before in the canon universe he would have been arrested.
He 'tried' to assassinate the head of the auror office (whomever that was) whilst not disguised, to cause maximum outrage, scandal, and attention. He reasoned that doing so would guarantee that the maximum efforts would be made to apprehend him (thereby guaranteeing only a skeleton staff around the ministry and Department of Mysteries to potentially complicate his trip there). Well that, and he wanted recognition and attention...
Harry Potter wiki, at the time of writing these notes (September, 2013) says it's implied in canon that Barty Crouch junior may have passed twelve OWLs. If that figure is correct, unless the curriculum at Hogwarts had changed much between Barty Crouch junior's time at the school and Harry Potter's, that means Barty took both divination and muggle-studies. I've certainly assumed for the purposes of this one-shot that he took (and passed) twelve OWLs, including divination and muggle-studies.
If Arabella Figg was in place in Privet Drive, Barty may or may not have known of her presence. If he was aware, he took steps to make sure that she could not become immediately aware that the Dursleys and Harry had gone missing. (Probably instructing his muggle criminal help to strike when the Dursleys were supposedly off on holiday or on a family visit to Vernon's relatives.)
The Dursleys certainly aren't going to willingly complain to anyone that they were abducted. Not with freaks having been involved (and one of those freaks apparently being Albus Dumbledore - not that the Dursleys ever saw for themselves the man that Barty pretending to be Remus told them was involved and called Albus Dumbledore).