This is a US Western Muggle AU - taking place sometime in the mid-1800s

Houses Challange

Hufflepuff- Year 2 - Drabble

Word Count [200-750] - Actual per Google Docs 750

Additional Requirement: Family

Prompt: [Object] Nail File

Hogwarts Challenges and Assignments Ravenclaw

Ancient Runes: Runic Numbers

Task 4 - Write about someone finding out they don't have long to live

Extra Credit: main character: Barty Crouch Jr.

xXx

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Crouch, but that was the last resort. There isn't anything else I can do..." She stared straight ahead, as the rest of his words blended into one. Death. She had felt its grasping hands reach out to her for a while, but had always been unwilling to concede defeat.

When it was clear he could do nothing more, the doctor was shown the door—wished safe travels and sent on his way. Afterward, Barty stayed by his beloved's side.

"I'm tired," she looked into Barty's eyes, and saw the fear that lay just beneath the surface. "I have to see my son one last time." A choking cough ravaged her entire body, her porcelain skin flushed with the effort, and bright red blood was wiped away as discreetly as possible.

Barty turned away from the sight, his heart breaking for his wife. Barty Jr. had been incarcerated for the last two years. In the beginning, Eloise was able to go with her husband to visit their son. It had been nearly a year since she had felt well enough to join her husband on the journey.

"Darling, he will be released in six months. You will see him just as soon as he gets out." Barty knew the letters were not enough, she wanted to hold her only boy in her arms. "I will go to the jailhouse tomorrow to see him so your mind can be at ease."

Eloise's eyes sparkled in the candlelight, and it took Barty's breath away. She looked like the girl he fell in love with years ago; before the hardships of life in the West, the stress of raising a willful boy to manhood, and the ravages of the consumption that strangled her every breath. "Will you take him something for me?"

Eloise leaned over and opened a small drawer in her bedside table. Shifting trinkets and letters around, her hand closed around a nail file she kept there. She may have been dying, but that was no reason to have chipped or broken fingernails.

"Please get this to him. Tell him I need to see him again." She pleaded with her husband and pressed the nail file into his hands

"I will do anything for you, my love."

xXx

Barty Crouch Jr. watched in amusement as his father walked into the small jailhouse. He normally came to visit on Sundays after church and exchanged letters Eloise had written the week before. The letters from his mother were the only things that got him through some days. More recently, though, the letters had been in his father's tidy handwriting, and not his mother's elegant script.

He didn't, however, normally bring a large cake covered in creamy white icing and what appeared to be daisies with cheery yellow centers. His father had always been the pillar of stodginess, so to watch him balance the fluffy confection, as he signed himself in, was quite comical indeed.

"Good afternoon, Father. I'd shake your hand, but it seems to be otherwise occupied." Barty Jr. smirked up from the scarred meeting table he had been sitting at, waiting for his father to arrive.

"How is Mom doing?" he asked, deliberately skirting around the elephant, or rather giant cake, in the room. "Here, I have another letter for you to take back to her." Barty slid the folded letter across to his father and watched as he tucked it discreetly into his breast pocket.

"Son, she's—she wanted me to bring this to you, so you may celebrate one more time with her, even if it is from afar." The look in his father's eyes was somehow full of both sorrow, and excitement. "She doesn't want you to share it with anybody, she made it special for her boy."

Shaking hands with his father after visiting hours had ended, Barty Jr. walked back to his cell carrying the cake in front of himself. That moment may have been the only time something as cheerful as the daisy covered cake traveled the halls of the jailhouse.

Later that night, after reading the letter his mother had written him to accompany the cake, Barty Jr. cut into it. Finally, in the third piece he found the nail file his mother had baked into it for him. After two nights of filing through the bars, he was finally able to break free. It was worth everything he was risking to hug his mother one last time.

He would do anything for her.