The Secret Joy of Barty Crouch
by vifetoile89
Disclaimer: I've said it for years, I'll say it again... I don't own Harry Potter.
This is quite a speculative fic, and dependent very much on the book version of Crouch, and not the film version. I am not trying to woobiefy Crouch, just consider his character in greater depth.
Bartemius Crouch, Jr., has secrets from the faculty of Hogwarts. Naturally. They think he's Mad-Eye Alastor Moody, for the love of Merlin. Of course he has secrets. But he has secrets even from the Death Eaters, and the Dark Lord whom he loves and serves. He has secrets even from himself.
Need me to name one? Fine.
Bartemius Crouch Jr. is happier as Professor Moody.
He is, in fact, far happier than he has ever been in his life as Barty Crouch Jr., student, Death Eater, prisoner, and everlasting disappointment. And it's not just because of his mission, his glorious and consuming mission for the Dark Lord, to which he is committed with every fiber of his being - although that's a plus.
It's that for the first time people don't look at him like he's Bartemius Crouch, son of Bartemius Crouch. Barty Crouch, the boy for whom Dahlia Crouch cried at night when she thought the rest of the house was asleep. Barty, the criminal who shivered at the sight of torture, whose own cruelty came into full blossom when he was locked up in Azkaban and it was too late, Barty who couldn't commit to being a good son, or a good student, or even a good killer.
As Professor Moody, people looked at him and they saw - well, they saw a mask, a living lie, but this was preferable to the skeleton he was. They saw a mighty soldier, with history, pride, authority - the survivor, if not the victor, of many battles, a man to obey or fight, not an object of pity, even with his amputated leg and his gouged-out eye. The injuries made him appear fearsome, indomitable. The hip flask made him appear dangerous, Byronically unstable. The lessons - and oh, he loved the lessons, more than he thought he could love anything other than his Dark Lord - they delighted him. He knew he was there for Potter, but after all Potter was only one boy, and there were whole classrooms who were looking to him for education. There were the Ravenclaws asking after theory, and the Slytherins demanding anecdote after anecdote, the Hufflepuffs, his former housemates, imagining ethical quandaries and how to resolve them. Even the Gryffindors, when they could be brought to think for once beyond black and white ethics, it would arrive to them like a thundershock, very satisfying. There were so many minds, and he was their custodian.
And the Longbottom boy…
The Longbottom boy brought him into conflict, conflict between the Crouch who saw him as a wound, a living reminder of the day his life had fallen apart, and wanted to hurt him, use him, torment the legacy of Frank and Alice Longbottom while they were helpless to help -
But then, damn it all, there was the Moody part of him, that saw in him a student with potential, real promise, under that fear and that pain, and worse, that saw in the Longbottom boy a Crouch boy, who had also been burdened with expectations and trying to find his place in the changing world, and Moody wanted to reach out and help him -
- the way that no one had reached out and helped Barty.
That was the conflict he faced in the daylight hours. It was bad enough in the day.
At night, he prepared his meal - the house-elves would never forgive him for doing his own cooking, and he would never forgive himself for never having learned to cook anything fancier than Brussel sprouts and roast beef. He would fix two plates, one for him, and one for his guest. The one for his guest was laced with potions to paralyze, potions to make the drinker talkative and honest. He would bring his guest - Moody the true - up to the office, an eye and a wand on him every second. The two men would eat, and then Barty would pour himself a cold drink (water, if you're curious, he didn't touch anything stronger, except the Polyjuice and, of course, coffee), and they would talk.
Moody at first was cold. Stone cold. He only answered what the potion made him say. But as the days turned into weeks and he realized, he was well and truly trapped, he began to talk more. He was as desperate for human contact as Barty was. And what started out as simple, straightforward questions - "What were you doing during the Van Hassel campaign? What did you do when you visited Treviso? What did Athanasius River say to you when you captured him?" - turned into long stories, musing, rambling in ways that Alastor Moody normally avoided.
Barty got to know Moody very well - all the better, he told himself, for his impersonation, for his ruse, not to mention all the ways he now knew to circumvent the Aurors - but he found himself absorbing these stories into himself. This was a life better lived, he knew, than his own life had been. Adventure, bravery, loyalty and commitment - these were things Barty had once craved for himself. He'd been forced to find them where he could. For Moody, his life was positively dripping in these, and they were just the beginning.
So Bart listened, and when Moody's voice had grown hoarse Barty would be surprised to see that they'd whiled away hours, talking and listening. Barty never talked of himself - revealing intelligence to the enemy, and besides, there was nothing he wanted to remember, let alone share - and when the words ran out Moody went back into the chest, and Barty quietly put away the additional information he had on who Moody was, and how to be him, and the mask and Polyjuice were ever more firmly entrenched, the latter digging its way even into his blood, so that now he was afraid of what he might be if ever he stopped taking it.
Then Barty would lie down on his bed, sleeping by snatches, one hour at a time, to drink more of the bitter potion. It would be past midnight when he began, and almost six when he dragged himself upright, eyes bleary and brain pounding at him for more sleep. "I'll catch up," he told himself. "Sooner or later, I'll catch up on sleep."
The moments between one task and another were given over to the Dark Lord, and what the world would be like when he was in charge - a stronger world, a world purged of weakness, a world of justice…
But doubtful thoughts nagged him even then. He doubted that it was a world where a fool boy like Longbottom, with all his potential, would be able to thrive. Him and his fool plants would be burned in the first fires of the new world.
Well… that was worth it, wasn't it?
That was the kind of questioning better saved for stumping a self-righteous Gryffindor student. It was not suited at all to Barty's mission, and his mission was the drumbeat by which he lived his life, his redemption for everything he had failed to be. But in the meantime... he was playing someone who had no need for redemption, forging a path he would never have considered taking, before. It was a rich, faulty, complicated, contradictory life - but god, Barty was happy.