Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Also, while names generally follow the Black Family Tree, dates may not. When canon is fuzzy or contradictory, GoF canon is, as a rule, what is followed in this story, since it begins with a scene from GoF. The dialogue of Bellatrix and the Barty Crouches in the prologue comes from pages 594-596 of the American hardcover of GoF and is in no way the property of the author.
Prologue: Over
April 12, 1982
"They say she laughed when she did it," a dark, stocky wizard muttered to his neighbor. "Bellatrix Lestrange. They say Alice begged her to stop, and she…" he trailed off, shaking his head in disgust and fear.
"I heard she meant to kill the boy," the pale neighbor answered. "What's his name – Neville? I heard she meant to kill him, too, but young Crouch stopped her."
The first wizard frowned. "If Crouch stopped her from killing the boy, why is he on trial with the rest of them, then?"
"Frank Longbottom kept mumbling…"
Though her blue cloak and hat covered her from hair to ankles already, Natalia tipped the latter further forward to shade more of her face from a crowd thick with Ministry employees. She would have worn a veil, if she could have, but that was not allowed inside the Ministry anymore. It was comforting to the populace to see tightened security measures at the seat of national government, and Barty Crouch, Sr. and Millicent Bagnold were very good at giving the public what it wanted.
The Aurors in place to control the group raised their wands, and the pale wizard fell silent as a hush descended over the assembly. Most of them had been attending trials regularly for several years, now, and the gesture John Dawlish and Albert Branstone were making meant only one thing. A few people in the line shifted as though to straighten it – like schoolchildren, Natalia thought – but no one spoke as the two wizards lowered their wands together and the courtroom behind them opened up to receive the two hundred people who would be allowed to watch the grand finale of the already infamous Crouch-Lestrange trials. For a long moment, no one moved.
Finally, a small woman wearing one of the vulture hats so often seen on older women in the past year stepped forward, followed by a similarly aged wizard who dwarfed her. The way Dawlish and Branstone ushered them through without a word confirmed them as Matthias and Augusta Longbottom. Were they receiving preferential treatment because of Frank and Alice, or had they arrived before dawn to guarantee their pick of seats at the condemnation of their son's torturers? Both options seemed plausible. Natalia only just stopped herself from adjusting her hat again. It would look suspicious, and suspicious minds caused mobs in an atmosphere like this. If Frank and Alice Longbottom could be destroyed beyond magic's ability to heal, no one was safe, and anyone a group perceived as a threat was in even more danger than everyone else.
She tilted her head back so Dawlish could see her as she approached the doors, and he winced slightly. John knew everything, of course, and had supported Barty Crouch Sr.'s suggestion that she stay well away from the Ministry until the furor over the trials died down. Though she knew it was inevitable that someone other than the two Aurors should hear who she was, she pitched her voice as closely to for their ears only as she could and gave her name with a Probity Probe pointed at her, as she was required to do by law before entering an official Ministry function. Illegal flasks of Polyjuice Potion had floated around too freely in the last year of the war. "Natalia Dolohova," she said, and was surprised when the words came out low and clear. She would not have imagined she could sound so calm under the present circumstances.
The mutters broke out immediately, of course, as someone heard what she had said and began to pass it back down the line. She even heard the witch directly behind her whisper, in a tone near hysteria, the words Death Eater, and another, whose gender she could not determine, mentioned a name that sounded an awful lot like Annika Wilkes. Natalia kept her gray eyes fixed on John's blue, refusing to acknowledge the whispers. There had been a time when it had been assumed that all Death Eaters were male, but Annika had proven the exception, and Bellatrix's arrest had caused mass paranoia. Everyone – witch or wizard – was subject to suspicion now, and none more so than relatives of proven or strongly suspected Death Eaters. Natalia thought she might be uniquely suited to conspiracy theories by virtue of having married two of Voldemort's followers, though. Even Bellatrix Lestrange and Annika Wilkes, known Death Eaters themselves, had only been married to one apiece.
John looked at her very hard for a moment before he nodded, evidently either deciding she knew what she was doing and could be trusted to do it or that there was nothing he could do to stop her. He was the wizard who had informed her of first her husband's arrest and then the arrests of Annika and Edmund Avery and the Lestranges; they were old friends, now. Natalia entered the courtroom without looking right, left, or directly at anything but the wall above the top row of seats. The scene was nightmarish enough without taking in the suddenly too-vivid colors of the dungeon and the sea of faces present to watch and, in all probability, cheer as four people – three of them people Natalia had known and cared for and for whom she still felt a reluctant affection - were sent to go mad and die in one of the most inhospitable locations known to wizardkind.
For some reason, perhaps reverence for the stiff figure of Augusta Longbottom and the specters of Frank and Alice, the crowd remained quiet as they filled the raised rows of seats. Natalia watched from the corner of her eye as Albus Dumbledore took one of the coveted benches beside the one Barty Crouch would officiate from. Other familiar faces came in – Cornelius and Helena Fudge, the strain and ambition in their faces forging one of the few similarities between them, had somehow managed to snag prime front-row seats below Crouch's to watch from, just enough of Narcissa's pale hair showed from beneath her deep hood to positively identify her and Lucius, and Walden Macnair even had the gall to come with his face uncovered and his new girl on his arm – but it was Dumbledore her eyes kept drifting back to. He looked somber, but not sad, as he sometimes did at trials, and Natalia knew some part of him was secretly happy. Dumbledore had been cozy with the Longbottoms, and Natalia suspected the great humanitarian, the chief voice against the use of the dementors to guard Azkaban, wanted nothing more than to see Barty Junior and the Lestranges rot in prison with their cousin Sirius Black and the spy Augustus Rookwood and Natalia's own husband, the murderer Antonin Dolohov. Her eyes drifted for a moment from the shining beard of the Hogwarts Headmaster to the empty seats soon to be occupied by Barty Crouch and, she suspected, his wife. So much for saintliness among the leaders of the light.
The staffs held by the unfamiliar Aurors flanking the inside of the door struck the floor three times, and the silence of the waiting line seemed indecently loud compared to what descended over the court. Though her first instinct was to shrink into a defensive huddle inside her robes, Natalia forced her spine to remain straight and refused to look, to think. She stared through the witches and wizards preventing her from seeing the opposite wall, keeping her chin low enough for the brim of her hat to shade her face and trying to remember who had composed the Wizarding Suite. Anything to keep from thinking about where she was, and why.
Just as the silence deepened to the point where Natalia thought her bones would soon shatter under its weight, the Aurors rapped out another three beats on the cold stone of the floor and raised their wands in a grim salute to each other and the wizard about to enter the presence of the court. The double doors opened for the second time, and Natalia found her gaze pulled, almost against her will, to the dark, severe-looking man in the center of a ring of Aurors temporarily doing duty as his bodyguards. Bartemius Crouch, Sr., Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Head of the Council of Magical Law, and probable future Minister of Magic, had arrived.
For once, Barty didn't bother to infuse his entrance with any more drama than his mandated late arrival guaranteed it. Striding quickly across the floor, he bundled the weeping witch on his arm up the narrow stairs so quickly Natalia wondered if her feet even touched the ground and lowered her, with a perfunctory show of gentleness, into her seat before taking his own. Without ceremony. Too gray for his age and thin for his height, he looked ten years older than he had during Antonin's trial, and something about the look on his face made Natalia wonder if some tiny, human fragment of him might have been knocked down a peg by the weeks his son had spent being roughly moved between interrogation rooms, prison cells, and one of the four chained chairs lined up in the center of the floor.
If it had or if it hadn't, she still felt no sympathy for him. His cause was admirable, his methods perhaps necessary, and he was probably the one man most responsible for her being alive to watch his son sent away with her friends, but she could not find it in her to forgive him for everything he had done along the way.
His wife, the dainty Cassandra Avery, was another matter. While her husband had aged under the strain of his duties during the war, Cassandra had withered away so slowly it was hard to remember the exact point it had become obvious she was ill, though Natalia was sure it had been before the news of her son's arrest, as the story went, threw her into a fit that landed her in St. Mungo's for most of the trial. Even from her post near the prisoners' door, Natalia could see that Cassandra's careful arrangement of dark blond curls looked too large for her head and that her once-pretty face was a shadow of itself. Her sobs, only slightly muffled by the handkerchief she held up to her mouth in her breakably thin hands, were the only sound in the courtroom, and Natalia thought they were worse than the silence had been. It was easy to feel sorry for her, especially when the blow had fallen so soon after she had assumed she and her family were finally safe.
"Bring them in," Crouch said without warning, his voice echoing through the room and shattering the tense silence. Natalia started in her seat, and she doubted she was the only one. Cassandra never stopped crying as the narrow door opened, admitting four humans and six dementors.
Natalia braced herself for it, but images still began flashing through her mind as the cold settled down on her. Her father's funeral. Annika, her face hard and driven, bundling up the bloody sheets of her bed, and Bellatrix's strained face the night they'd buried a friend, and Isobel, who she refused to think about. Antonin, walking in after the Prewett attacks that had changed everything, covered in blood. Barty Crouch's eyes. She gripped the edge of the bench hard, fighting off the alternating waves of terror and chest-clenching pain and the over-arching, crushing sense of hopelessness.
"…can't believe he'll imprison his own son," the witch beside her whispered to someone. Maybe even her. Strangers could become friends in a place like this.
She made herself open her eyes as Bellatrix sat down in the third chair, between her brother-in-law and Barty Crouch, Jr. Natalia supposed they had separated Bellatrix and Rodolphus intentionally, though Rodolphus hardly looked up to giving comfort by proximity, much less conspiring. His catatonic stare, even viewed from an angle, was unsettling. Rabastan looked as though he wanted to run, and Barty could not have looked more frightened if he'd been facing the dementor scheduled to take his soul. Bellatrix – her hair smooth and shining, her pale grey prison robes as tidy as if she were about to take tea – was the only one who seemed truly poised. She put her arms on those of the chair without being prompted, and the golden chains barely spoiled her dignity as they tied her in place. Though she knew it was no longer appropriate, Natalia felt a flicker of pride in knowing her.
A movement in the audience – why could she not stop thinking of it all as a game, a master play, instead of a real event? – caught her eye as Barty Crouch Sr. stood and looked down on the four prisoners, his hands clasped behind his back as of old. She was too far away to make out his expression, but she could imagine it being as usual, too. Just another day for the Head of the Council of Magical Law, the criminals behind another atrocity brought to justice. No matter that one of the criminals was his only son and heir; it was the criminal part that was important. He and Severus Snape could have bonded over degrees of cognitive dissonance – if Snape was, as Dumbledore seemed to think he was, sincere in his repentance.
"You have been brought here before the Council of Magical Law," he said, his orator's voice ringing out across the dungeon while remaining clear enough for every witch and wizard present to hear and understand, "so that we may pass judgment on you for a crime so heinous – "
"Father," Barty Junior tried to interrupt, "Father…please…"
" – that we have rarely heard the like of it within this court," the elder Crouch continued, giving no sign he'd heard his son except raising his voice without changing his tone. "We have heard the evidence against you. The four of you stand accused of capturing an Auror – Frank Longbottom – and subjecting him to the Cruciatus Curse, believing him to have knowledge of the present whereabouts of your exiled master, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named – "
"Father, I didn't!" the nineteen-year-old boy screamed up at the high seat. Natalia squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out his voice as he began to beg. "I didn't, I swear it, Father, don't send me back to the dementors – "
The polished mask of Crouch Sr.'s professionalism began to slip as he raised his voice still further. "You are further accused of using the Cruciatus Curse on Frank Longbottom's wife when he would not give you information. You planned to restore He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to power and to resume the lives of violence you presumably led while he was strong. I now ask the jury – "
"Mother! Mother, stop him, Mother, I didn't do it, it wasn't me!"
Even from her seat, Natalia could tell that Barty Crouch's face was reddening with fury. In the eleven years of his rise to power, she had never seen him lose even that much control, not to this point. Perhaps he was human. "I now ask the jury," he shouted, somehow still managing to insert a grand, oratorical edge, "to raise their hands if they believe, as I do, that these crimes deserve a life sentence in Azkaban!"
As every other head in the room turned toward the jury, Natalia closed her eyes again. It was already done, and there was no need for her to see it. She could no longer remember why she had thought she had to be here for this in the first place. The applause of the audience mixed with the boy's screams for Cassandra in her ears, a whirl of sound that battered her and threatened to overwhelm her until the sound of Bellatrix's voice jolted her back into the courtroom in time to see the first woman initiated into Voldemort's inner circle on her own account and the first friend Natalia had made in the circle that had eventually killed her first husband shovel in the last of the dirt for her own grave.
"The Dark Lord will rise again, Crouch!" Bellatrix called out, appearing to ignore the dementor at her shoulder. "Throw us into Azkaban; we will wait! He will rise again and will come for us, he will reward us beyond any of his other supporters! We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!"
Bellatrix swept toward the door as the crowd began to get unruly, jeering and taunting her and her fellow prisoners. Rodolphus and Rabastan were already gone, never, Natalia was somehow sure, to be seen again by her. In her dementor-affected, disconnected frame of mind, she felt she could not let Bellatrix disappear in the same way. Without thinking, she stood and threw herself at the low barrier separating her seat from a drop to the floor and called out to her. "Bellatrix!"
For a moment, she thought her voice had been lost in the noise, but then she saw the tiniest flicker of surprise cross Bellatrix's beautiful face at the sound of her own name. She glanced sideways without pausing in her exit and caught Natalia's eye, and for a split second her expression was unreadable. Then, just before Natalia lost sight of her face, her upper lip curled in a familiar, disdainful sneer.
Natalia fell back into her seat as the Head of Magical Law Enforcement, the savior of Wizarding Britain, second in public regard only to Harry Potter himself, disowned his son and ignored his fainting wife. The noise of the crowd faded into the background as Barty Crouch Jr. was dragged screaming from the courtroom and Natalia went blank. She barely felt the cold of the dementors as they passed, barely heard Dumbledore's attempt to restore order as Crouch struggled to master himself. She could not take her eyes off the rough wooden door Bellatrix had vanished into before she could explain that this was not the way she had meant for it to be. She was falling backwards down the familiar tunnel of dissociation, watching the gap between door and wall narrow in slow motion as the last two dementors forced young Crouch to leave the room. It seemed it would go on forever, but finally, just before she hit the bottom, the door closed with a snap and it was over.