V.
The trial was over quickly. The perpetrators had been careless, and had been caught quickly; the sounds of screaming from a supposedly abandoned building tended to draw attention.
Ultimately, the bravery of Alice and Frank Longbottom was laudable, but served nothing except to prolong their agony. By the time the authorities arrived and rescued them, nothing more could be done for them. It had been known virtually since the time of the curse's creation that the Cruciatus Curse, used by Bellatrix Lestrange in the futile attempt to extract information from them, had deleterious effects on the physical and mental well-being of its victims. When a victim was hit with it multiple times, especially in quick succession, these effects were multiplied.
No one ever got a word out of Alice or Frank. They said nothing, were silent. Their eyes stared vacantly into space. They knew not where they were, who their friends and family were, nor, so it seemed, who they themselves were.
They were well-liked, well-loved Aurors. Now they were worse than dead, and to top it all off they had left behind a two-year-old son, Neville, left in the care of his grandmother, Augusta. The public was enraged. They demanded justice. No, they demanded revenge.
At the trial, two men stared into space and said nothing. A woman sat in chains upon a chair as though it were a throne. A boy screamed to his father for mercy, and his father said to him that he had no son. They were locked away in Azkaban, among lunatics and Dementors, and that was to be the end of it.
Lucius Malfoy was not able to wrest the Black fortune away from its previous owners. Arcturus Black became furious at his attempts and said that even if Walburga was the one who lived at the house in Grimmauld Place, he was still the head of the Black family and he'd be damned before he saw so much as a Knut of his fall into the hands of the Malfoy family. He went so far as to re-instate his oldest grandson, Sirius, as his heir, in defiance of Sirius's disinheritance and his imprisonment in Azkaban. If Lucius wanted the money, Arcturus said, he would have to wait until every single Black family member was dead. And that included Andromeda and her daughter.
A year after he sentenced his son to life imprisonment in Azkaban, Barty Crouch, Sr., having experienced a change of heart, was in the middle of struggling to form a rescue plan, and always failing, when his deathly ill wife, always a skilled brewer of potions, provided him with a solution. Young Barty was smuggled away from Azkaban, wearing his mother's face. Clio died in prison, wearing the face of her son. A corpse would not shake off the effects of Polyjuice potion, and she'd not lasted long enough to exhaust her supply. She was buried in a grave on the desolate island, under her son's name. No one was forced to play the role that they had, whatever conclusion young Barty came to later, no one save the house-elf Winky.
Crouch intended to send his son off to some distant land under an assumed name, but was appalled to discover that his son was still possessed of loyalty to Voldemort—indeed, far greater loyalty than he had imagined. Disobedient and recalcitrant, once Barty had recovered he was all fire and rage for the man who he believed had abandoned his mother to her death, and who kept him from his ultimate goal. Barty was restrained under the Imperius Curse, and under Winky's influence. He was kept hidden beneath an Invisibility Cloak in his father's home.
Augusta Longbottom took her grandson to visit his parents in St. Mungo's over the holidays. She never felt that he lived up to their example.
Bellatrix Lestrange wasted away in prison. Her beauty faded, replaced by a gaunt unwholesomeness. Her eyes burned like dying coals, sunken deep in her waxen face. Obsession and fanaticism had already been present in her heart, but it festered there, and like a cancer it devoured her whole. What she would do to the unclean, impure world, if ever she was just given the chance.
Twelve years after the trial, a man disguised as another man was teaching at Hogwarts. He found that he enjoyed teaching students, as much as he ought to have been purely focused upon his mission. At Hogwarts, he saw old faces and new. He looked into the face of the Death Eater's son, and felt hatred for the one who had never lost anything of importance. And when he looked into the face of the Aurors' son, he felt a mix of pity and contempt for the one who had been left behind, and seemed not to know what to do with his survival.