AN: Don't own Harry Potter. Another chapter to follow shortly.

At St. Mungo's. It's been a series of returns for me since beginning this case. Azkaban to St. Mungo's Hospital to prison to hospital and back again. The prison and the prisoner, tied undisputedly. Harry sees me enter Crouch's secured wing and calls after me, but my purpose is too great to answer my superior.

"You were never really alone, were you?"

"Uh, what?" Crouch was napping, or in a medicinal fog, I gather. He's a bit unprepared for my question. I don't care. I need to know if I'm right.

"What is it? A Nature spirit? A sprite of some kind? A rogue elf? Or is it just some elemental presence?"

"Slow down, Anwen," Harry says calmingly from the closing doorway. "What are you asking him about?"

I take a deep breath, centering my thoughts and stilling the small shakes my excited thoughts have inspired. "On Azkaban today. Something fresh and bright and friendly and -"

"Childlike," Crouch says with shocked wonder.

"Yes," I tell him, waiting for more.

"Playing with you."

"Yes."

"I don't know who, or what, it is. It's been with me almost from the beginning of my incarceration. I think it listens to me. It never speaks," he says sadly. How he must have wished it would speak.

"Why didn't you tell us before?" Harry gruffly questions.

"I don't like you," Crouch snaps. "And her, her I don't know. It never revealed my secret to anyone. I felt I needn't tell on it, either."

"Your secret?" I have to ask.

"Of my consciousness."

"Did it cause the explosion, Mr. Crouch?" It had to have. It's the only thing that could have done. I don't understand why. I need him to shed some light.

"Why do you ask that?" the prisoner asks defensively.

"Yes, why do you think it might have?" Harry is confused.

But Ron knows the sense of it and tells him so when he finally catches up and enters the room. "Because there can be no magic on Azkaban. And this plant is magic. Big Magic. Capital M."

"Plant," Harry says confused. Ron gives him an I'll tell you later head shake.

Barty commands our attention again. "It isn't malicious," he insists, defending what must have been his only friend. "It's never harmed me."

"I believe you," I promise.

"I haven't heard that in a very long time," he tells me, sadness in his eyes as he looks at me. Maybe a bit of a wan smile.

"Was it only you?" Harry Potter has no time for soft emotions here today. Not with this man. I understand, I do. But I am having a hard time maintaining that kind of emotional distance at the moment.

"How do you mean?"

"Did the tendrils ever come out to play with anyone else?"

"What bloody tendrils?" a very frustrated Auror asks. Ron takes Harry to the side of the room and quietly explains what happened to me today out on that black rock. I can see Barty doesn't need to be told.

"No, not that I know. I never heard happy sounds coming from anywhere else."

"Why you?" I ask him with a tilt of my head.

"You won't believe me," he says with confidence as he turns his head on his pillow.

"Try me. I have so far." I step closer to the bed, hoping to encourage an answer, encourage him to sit up. Encourage him.

"Because I'm innocent."

I am incredulous. Utterly disbelieving for a moment.

"Told you," he says, trying hard for a smug look. He doesn't quite mask the disappointment. He closes his eyes at the sounds of distrust erupting from the Aurors behind me.

"You are not innocent," Harry snaps.

"Of killing my father, no," Crouch admits, his voice stronger. He sits up in his bed and faces us all. "I did that, and with good reason. But the other? The crime of which I was originally convicted? The very thing that damned me to hell on earth? Not me. It wasn't me." He lowers his voice, seeming to just have realized he'd raised it. "My father knew it. I think my little green friend did, too. And took pity on me. in that place."

I think I believe him. I hear Ron and Harry murmuring in anger, robes rustling as they move about in their agitation. Both of them pissed beyond belief, I expect, but too professional to cut off a talking suspect. Real cops, my Dad would say.

"Your father knew?" I prompt. He keeps his body facing me but flicks his deep brown eyes just to the side. I'm in his peripheral, I know, but I'm not too sure he still really sees me. I study his face as he prepares himself to speak. The sharp chin, the thin but expressive mouth, the youthful freckles on the face of the most severely haunted man I have ever met.

"I was always a strange child," he begins.

"Are we really going to have to hear the origin story?" Ron whines. No other word for it; he sounds like he's fourteen.

"Answers are not always short, are they, Weasley? Or easy, for that matter. Eh, Potter?" Crouch challenges them, and they are silent. "My life doesn't begin with the Dark Lord. That's where it comes to an end. At least, the life I understood."

"Please, go on, Barty." It isn't until he raises one thin eyebrow that I realize what I've said. Somehow, he isn't Prisoner Crouch right now.

He sighs, then continues, finding his focus beyond me again. "I saw things differently than everyone else. I had to be my mother's favorite because I certainly wasn't anybody else's. Father hated my differences, my otherness. He hated the way his friends looked at me, the way other children turned away. No friends, no support, no direction."

"Familiar for more than one of us in this room, I'd guess," I murmur.

"Really?" he asks but continues talking, not waiting for an answer. "Voldemort preyed upon the weak. Obviously there were the power hungry, the true believers in the anti-Muggle message. So many of us, though, we the depressed and the bullied. He gave us validation and acceptance, direction and a bit of borrowed strength. We found it nowhere else, and he knew it. Knew how to make our unhappiness work for him."

He threw his legs over the side of his bed, clad in sweats rather than an open-backed gown. He stood up and made a motion to walk around. Harry stepped closer to me, and Barty looked at him for permission to move. At a nod from me, Harry resumed his position near the door with Ron. There is no ease in this room, no comfort with the situation, but I guess there's an uneasy acceptance.

Crouch talks as he paces. "I followed him, I admit. Charismatic, was Voldemort. He gave me purpose and authority. I knew it was wrong, his ideas simply awful, unsubstantiated jealously and hatred. But to be honest, Agent Hafgan, being a bad man was so much more fun than being a good boy."