A / N : Chapter two! I'm actually doing alright in my "properly infrequent updates" pledge, aren't I? I'm quite proud of myself.
Anyway, here you are to everyone lovely enough to read chapter one – chapter two! In which Barty pays attention to all the wrong things, and another pureblood party goes horribly wrong. Oh, and before we start, just a quick thank-you to I Love Rodolphus Lestrange, my anon reviewer. It's always appreciated, really. :D
Enjoy!
"Because the drugs never work,
They're gonna give you a smirk,
'Cause they got methods of keeping you clean . . ." - Teenagers, by My Chemical Romance.
"Hey, um, Critch . . . right? What's in these canapés?"
It was ten 'o' clock and Barty was already bored, something that usually boded ill for everyone in his immediate vicinity. But he wanted to be good today. Or more accurately, having recently been caught in a few situations that had been difficult to explain (to say the least), he wanted to look like he was being good.
That wouldn't have been so hard, if being good wasn't so unbearably boring.
He looked his questioner up and down. She was a girl, pretty in a bland sort of way, wearing a bright orange dress that was a long way from pretty.
"Crouch," he said irritably.
The girl blinked. "What?"
"My name isn't Critch, it's . . ." He sighed, wondering why he was bothering. Stupid people, in Barty's experience, rarely listened when you tried to tell them just how stupid they were. So he changed tack. "Why are you eating that?" he asked instead. "Don't you know what's in it?"
"What's in it?" the girl asked nervously.
Barty smiled. Yes. Stupid people rarely realized how stupid they were. But if they did . . . well, they wouldn't be half so entertaining. So he smiled, and pulled the canapé gently out of her hand.
"It's an experimental menu," he yawned. "Fusion cuisine or something . . . . I think it's Flobberworm," he said seriously, looking her in the eye.
The girl gaped at him for a moment, horrified when his serious expression didn't falter, and then she gagged. Barty grinned as she ran away. His grin widened when she ran headlong into his father. He laughed, watching her stutter apologies while his father glowered at her, but he turned away quickly when she fled and his father began to glare at him.
"Is Narcissa Malfoy coming?" a woman to his left asked her companion.
"No," the other witch replied sniffily, sucking on the olive in her cocktail with a sour expression. "Her husband RSVP'd for her, apparently she's ill." She chewed on her cocktail stick, and let out a contemptuous snort. "There's a word for 'snobbish' I've never heard before."
Barty rolled his eyes. His mother volunteered to spend time with people like this, and thought he was malevolent. Sometimes, he really wondered about her. (Mostly, he wondered how and why a person would make themselves so ignorant of the world around them, but occasionally he wondered if there was actually something wrong with her.)
"Barty!"
He blinked. "Wow. I can summon you just by thinking about you. That's new."
His mother laughed unsteadily. "Darling?"
"That was a joke, Mother." Why was it his mother could never tell when he was joking?
She smiled nervously at him. "Oh. Of course it was. Of course." She reached out to adjust his tie, but stopped at the look on his face. "Are you having fun?" she asked instead.
Barty stared at her, wondering if she had lost her mind completely, and her smile shrank a little.
"It's – it's a nice party, isn't it?" his mother stammered.
Barty stared at her for another long moment, and then he sighed. "Oh yes," he said dully. "I never want it to end."
His mother beamed at him, and Barty suppressed a sudden urge to knock his head against the wall. He reached instead for a drink, but had taken no more than a sip when someone prised it out of his hand.
"That's enough of that, boy," his father said curtly.
Barty scowled. "I'm of age," he replied angrily.
"Don't answer back to me," his father snapped. "You are at a public function, and I will not allow you to disgrace this family. Do you understand?"
"Father, it's white wine," Barty objected. "How drunk can I get?"
His father's eyes bulged. "I will not allow you to embarrass this family," he said tautly.
Barty swallowed hard and stuck his hands in his pockets, comforted by the feel of his wand in his clenched fist.
"Your faith in me is just staggering, really," he said sardonically.
There was a stiff silence as his parents exchanged meaningful looks, something that never produced a cheerful result. Fortunately they were interrupted by a staid-looking official of some sort before they could begin to lecture him. His father slipped immediately into Ministry-mode.
"Come, boy," he ordered, seizing his son by the collar and trying to steer him away. "Listen and you may learn something."
Barty glared at his mother as she pushed him helpfully towards his father. When she simply smiled encouragingly at him he gave in, deciding he'd revenge himself upon them both later. He threw himself into a chair at the table in bad spirits, ignoring his father's expression, and tuned out, watching tiny flames flicker in the candlebra as Crouch Sr droned on and on about civil rights suspensions and tactical politics and strategical alliances . . . .
Barty pulled a candle free and held the tip of his finger up to the flame, watching with a sort of idle satisfaction as the fire smoothed the tiny swirls and whorls in his skin, turning it first healthy pink and then angry red. He swallowed when it began to smart, ignoring the involuntary twitching of his hand. The skin was swelling now, a blister forming. It looked raw and red and new and clean . . .
"Boy! What did I just say?"
Barty blinked. "Father, I'm listening."
His father's toothbrush moustache twitched. "What did I just say?"
Barty put the candle back in its proper place with a sigh and sat up straight. "We must fight strength with strength," he recited. "If we prove to those who oppose us that the upper echelons of the Ministry are immoveable, we set an example to those below and inspire them to hold fast in times of strife. We cannot afford to waste compassion on criminals, for the sake of the wider wizarding community. Those who do not abide by the laws intended to protect that community cannot logically expect those same laws to protect them! We must put the safety of those who cannot defend themselves before the rights of people who scorn everything we hold dear. Now is the time to be united in strength, not divided by beauocracy and–boy-what-did-I-just-say?"
He smirked. "I considered banging the table at 'logically expect'," he added helpfully, "but it seemed a bit much."
The foreign minister gaped at him, and a vein began to throb in his father's temple. Barty waited patiently. Really, reeling off his father's entire argument verbatim was easier than it seemed. There was always a part of his mind – like a separate layer of consciousness – that was acutely aware of where his father was and what he was doing. He put a hand in his pocket again, feeling his burnt fingertip stick to the wood of his wand, and frowned, annoyed.
Now it wouldn't be clean any more.
Maybe it had been a bad idea, he reflected, to deliver his father's words in his father's voice.
He eyed the foreign minister, and smiled as the silence swelled. "Nice to meet you by the way."
One of his father's eyes now looked in danger of popping clean out of its socket. Crouch Sr stood up abruptly, his chair screeching in protest at such harsh treatment. "We are leaving," he said curtly. "Consider yourself dismissed."
Barty laughed. Dismissed. Like an employee. "But I didn't learn anything!" he called at his father's retreating back. "Bye," he added as the other man stood up and hurried after him, shiny shoes clicking against the polished floor like the pincers of a beetle.
He had no sooner reached for a drink when someone else caught his hand. "Where did your father go? What did you do?" his mother asked nervously. She couldn't have looked more alarmed if her husband and son had been duelling for all the world to see.
Barty scowled. "I listened," he said slowly, "and I talked."
"But – but where's your father?"
Barty put down the glass of his own accord this time, and glared at his mother. Why did she have to make everything about his father? Couldn't she forget about him for five minutes and pay attention to something else? Everything was always, always about him – what he thought and what he wanted and why he needed to be obeyed and made proud and respected and -
"How should I know?" he snapped. "Curled up in a desk drawer with the Mongolian Minister for Magic, maybe. I'm going to get some air."
He pushed past her and crossed the dancefloor, deliberately getting in the way of as many dance partners as possible en route to the window. Once there he stopped and took a deep breath, trying to calm down but distracted by his reflection. He looked pale and ghostly, backlit by the velvet blackness of night and a few hazy, dimly reflected splotches of candlelight. But even in that poor mirror image, he could see that his eyes were too wide and too bright – they were giving him away again, when they ought to be dull and dark like everyone else's. He was too hot and his eyes were too bright and his heart was beating too fast, veins writhing snakelike beneath his skin. He knew this feeling too well, and he had never been good at controlling it. It was the feeling he got when he needed to do something, a feeling like a fever. Stealing his senses and setting him on fire and it wanted him to do something, to make a bad idea an amusing reality. But he couldn't. Not here and not now. He'd be punished enough for his disobedience, when his father found the time to do it . . . push him any further and Barty had a feeling he wouldn't see sunlight for the next ten years. He swallowed, horribly aware of the fact that he was failing and starting to panic. He had to make it stop.
Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it -
It was the flash of green that did it. It caught his eye, and later he was sure it was a sign. Barty wasn't entirely sure he believed in signs, but this one got his attention and sometimes that was all he really needed to believe. A spark to light the dark, and start a fire.
It pulled him back from the brink and closer to the window, magnetized. A glittering green constellation high above him, a skull shining sharp as a star against the sky and a serpent trailing from its jaws, hypnotic in its trancelike undulations. The erratic beating of his heart intensified, but Barty didn't really mind because it was simply keeping him in place, silent fascination keeping that other feeling at bay.
It knew what he needed. It was more than just luck, surely. It had to be.
He took a deep breath, one laced with promise and excitement and the tantalizing taste of things yet to come, and watched the serpent twist and turn.
A sign.
Had no-one noticed it? Were they blind?
Barty was still staring transfixed at the skull, a new fire igniting in his veins, when the windows blew in with a sense-shattering SMASH, and the world went black.
