Tuesday, 21 December 1993
Moon Gardens, Devon
Mr. Tim Moon was a very severe, stern-looking man, with indeterminately brown hair, brown eyes, and a slightly-too-prominent nose, which both Sean and Lilian had inherited. The lines on his face attested that, despite his attempts at holiday levity, he more often wore a scowl of Snape-like proportions.
Mrs. Dahlia Moon, nee Rosier, seemed to be drugged. Mary's first impression was that she was drunk, but as the day wore on, she decided that some sort of happy pills or potion was more likely at work. The older witch was very… mellow. To the point of absent-minded unresponsiveness. Like Mrs. Putnam at Number 5, the summer she had discovered Xanax.
Mary wasn't certain, but Yule dinner might have been the most awkward meal she'd ever had anywhere, including all the years she'd lived with the Dursleys. At least when they didn't want her there, they sent her away. The Moons stubbornly pretended nothing was wrong, while treating their own children like distant strangers.
On top of that, Sean was irritable because Lilian hadn't warned him that she was inviting Mary and Hermione over and he hadn't been allowed to have Dunsidget over, or else go to his place, which Mary was certain had to be less awful. And while Aerin didn't seem to really be angry with the younger girls anymore, she also didn't have nearly as much in common with them as she once had, given that they hadn't spent any time at all together over the past term, and therefore hadn't had any recent adventures together. They made small talk. It was almost as sad as it was awkward, realizing how far apart they had grown in just half a year.
And of course, all three of the girls were angry and resentful of each other by the time the food was served, which didn't help the atmosphere at all. Sean and Aerin were both obviously curious about what had happened in the few hours immediately before dinner, but they couldn't ask over the meal without being inexcusably impolite.
In hindsight, Mary suspected that Lilian's invitation might have been less in the spirit of supporting her friend's morale throughout this awful dinner, and more along the lines of misery loving company.
It had only been one day, but between the undeniable tension at the Grangers' and the horrible uncomfortableness here, Mary was already regretting having argued to leave Hogwarts for the holiday. Just remember, there are dementors at Hogwarts, she told herself sternly, picking at her pudding and waiting impatiently for the visit to be over.
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The holiday had been very different than it would have been at school.
Mary had woken early, as was her habit, and helped Dan cook a massive breakfast (to be snacked on all morning) before Hermione and Emma rose for the day, then spent several hours poking around the re-organized, half-renovated house and talking to the adults about their plans for decorating the new spare bedroom (hopefully with less large floral prints than the old one, and maybe a green and gold color-scheme). She had established that they would be going shopping for last-minute Christmas/"Belated Yule" gifts the following day, and asked whether she could visit St. Mungo's with the Longbottoms on Christmas. The Grangers had said yes, provided they could meet Neville and Madam Longbottom before she went, and Mary had owled Neville with the conditional response.
Hermione, still upset that renovations had been made without consulting her, had sulked in her room with a novel and a mug of hot cocoa until it was time to get ready to head over to the Moons'. Mary could tell that it was bothering her parents that she didn't want to spend time with them, when she was only home for a few weeks, and they only had time off from work for one of them, but when she tried to point this out, all the older girl had said was, "Good! Maybe they'll think about me next time before they go changing our whole bloody life around!"
After that, Mary had just left her to it.
As soon as they had arrived at Lilian's house, they had been introduced to her parents, who were not, in fact, out of the country. According to Lilian, Sean had just said that because it was practically unacceptable by certain standards for at least one parent not to come fetch the children from the station. Sending them off from home was one thing, but failing to welcome them back was quite another.
Lilian had given them a tour of the house, grounds, and kennels while Hermione complained about the changes her parents had made in her absence, without even thinking to warn her about any of it. The nerve!
Mary spent most of the day keeping her mouth shut. She did see how Hermione had a point, when she said that they ought to have at least told her what they were doing, but she personally didn't think it was that big of a deal. It was the Doctors Granger's house. They were the ones who had to live there all year 'round. And it really wasn't that inconvenient to have the electricity confined to only a few rooms. If anything, it was less strange, at least to her, than coming back to a purely muggle home, given that she'd only spent a few weeks away from magic in the past two and a half years.
Still, she was certain that her opinion would be unwelcome. Lilian was obviously glad of the distraction from her own familial issues, and kept encouraging Hermione's bitching. By the time they had completed the tour, she was starting to repeat herself.
Part of the problem was that there wasn't much for the children to do on the day of Yule. So far as Mary could tell, the major symbolic part of the holiday was putting out all of the fires in the house at dawn, cleaning out the old ashes, and then re-lighting them at sunset, with a coal saved from the old fire. This was why they had had to floo to the kennels, rather than the main house, and why the Yule feast would be served so late – the elves couldn't even start cooking it until sunset.
According to Aerin, the elves had done the hard work of cleaning out the fire-grates and chimneys, so there was nothing for the girls to do until they re-convened to re-light the hearth fire in the kitchen. After that, they would have a few more hours to amuse themselves before dinner, and then, after Mary and Hermione went back to the Grangers', the Moon children would hole themselves up in a parlor telling stories, playing games, and catching up with one another, keeping a vigil until dawn.
That part of the day sounded like the most fun to Mary (though playing with the latest litter of barghest pups on their tour might have come close). Right now, the house was freezing, and there was nothing to do inside, so all of the teens had taken to the outdoors. At least there they didn't expect to be warm. After they finished having a look around, Lilian had led her friends out to a nearby wood, to help collect and shape an ash faggot for Christmas proper. Neither Mary nor Hermione had ever done such a thing before. In the Dursleys' house, a Yule Log was a sort of cake, and the gas fireplace had long been blocked off, due to Dudley's brief infatuation with setting things on fire when they were five or six. Getting the thing to hold together without using magic was far more difficult than Mary would have suspected. They did manage it, though, and levitated it triumphantly back to the house, just in time to see the re-lighting.
It was a very simple, solemn ceremony.
The children stood back as Mrs. Moon carried a heavy ceramic bowl filled with hot coals into the kitchen. "I come bearing the seed of the hearth-flame," she said diffidently. "As the year waxes and wanes, so too does the fire, never gone, but only waiting to spring again into life." She sounded almost bored.
Mr. Moon removed the lid from the bowl, and took a tiny scoop to carefully shift the coals to the fresh tinder in the grate.
"Without light, there is no darkness, and without darkness, no light," he declaimed, his voice much louder and stronger than his wife's. "The House of Moon renews this fire against the coming of the longest night."
The adults set their tools aside, and the family (and Mary and Hermione) joined hands, creating a half-circle around the hearth, with Mr. and Mrs. Moon at either open end, and the hot coals, not yet a fire, between them. They chanted an invocation in a language Mary didn't know – maybe something related to Greek? – their free hands held out toward it. Their voices wound around each other, distorting the words, but creating a cadence that spoke to Mary on a fundamental level of heat and light, and after a few long seconds, she felt magic coursing through them, a bit of her own power joining Mr. Moon and Lilian's and Hermione's, flowing out to find Sean and Aerin and Mrs. Moon. The hot coals erupted into flame, completing the circuit as the chant reached a crescendo, and then the sense of connection faded away.
"We welcome the light and the flame into our home and our hearts," Mr. Moon said, his voice alone almost too quiet to hear against the crackling of the newly lit fire. "Let its heat ward away the cold of winter as the light begins to regain its strength, continuing the eternal cycle."
"So mote it be," the family replied, Mary and Hermione just slightly out of sync with the others.
And with that, it was done. Mr. and Mrs. Moon, Sean, and Aerin disappeared as the elves stepped out of whatever corners they had been hiding in, and began pulling dish after dish from the cold-box and lighting ovens. They were grinning and singing merrily in their own high-pitched language. It made Mary smile just to see them. There were only four – one who normally cooked and kept the house, and three who worked in the kennels, according to Lilian – but they managed to give as much life and bustle to the Moons' kitchen as a hundred Hogwarts elves could have done. They were clearly enjoying the holiday far more than any of the humans.
"So what now?" Hermione asked.
Lilian shrugged. "We can't go back outside until dawn, so I guess we can go hang out in my room. At least we can light the braziers now."
Lilian's room was toward the back of the sprawling, one-story home. It was clear that more rooms had been added on as needed over the years, such that the building itself wasn't really symmetrical. The name of the house, Moon Gardens, came from the fact that it had spread to create lots of little courtyards, all of which, Lilian explained, were landscaped, and much prettier in any other season. Even the corridors had windows, overlooking these yards, and there were lots of little benches, both inside and out, to sit and appreciate them. Lilian's room was across a garden from Aerin's, with windows on three sides. They could see the older girl's shadow against her shades as she lit her own lamps and fires.
The room itself was decorated in a hodge-podge of styles, accumulated over the years. It was clearly very much Lilian's space, standing in stark contrast to Hermione's room, which had clearly been thoroughly re-decorated by an adult, or Mary's cupboard, which had never had much in the way of decoration at all. In fact, now that she thought about it, none of the places Mary had ever slept had had much decoration.
Lilian's walls were painted a pastel purple, with gold accents at the windows and door-frame. These matched the slightly-battered desk, wardrobe, and dresser, but they had been nearly completely covered by framed pressed flowers; moving photos of magical creatures and clouds; black-and-white muggle photos of the moors; knotted and braided decorations made of ribbon and twigs; Quidditch posters for the all-female Holyhead Harpies and the Hartland Hippogriffs (the local Devon team); and the occasional muggle band or movie poster. There was a bookshelf full of dog-eared novels, and a collection of miss-matched chairs and small tables, arranged in corners and around a pair of fire-dogs, not unlike the ones in Slytherin. A record-player sat on one of these, with a teetering stack of muggle and magical records piled beneath it. There was a fluffy Slytherin-green blanket on the bed, and a chaser's glove and a stray sock peeking out from under it, as though Lilian had tidied rather hastily, simply shoving any clutter out of sight.
Hermione lit the fire with a quick incendio (only too pleased to have one more chance to use magic before they returned to her parents' house), then moved to look at the novels on the shelves. Lilian started to pull the curtains closed, but stopped when she reached the window that faced Aerin's. She froze, her face expressing nothing, but after two and a half years, Mary was more than capable of reading her friend's body language. She could guess what the older girl was thinking. It had been a recurring pre-occupation for her since Mabon, after all.
"You should tell her," she said quietly.
Lilian jumped, then tried to cover. "Tell who what?" she asked, with a tone of false confusion.
Mary sighed. "Aerin. About Connor."
An indecisive shadow passed over the normally bold Slytherin's face. "I can't," she said, almost pleading. "She wouldn't be able to…" she trailed off.
"I know you don't want her to suffer through knowing like you have been, that you want to protect her, but she's older than us, and at least if she knew, you could share the pain," Mary pointed out.
"I thought you were with Sean, saying I shouldn't tell her."
"That was before. I've been watching, and… You two used to be so close, and now…" Mary trailed off, uncertain as to whether she should say it, but then decided that she should. It needed to be said. "Your parents already treat you like strangers. I hate seeing you and Aerin becoming strangers, too. Is it really worth protecting her if you don't even talk to each other anymore?"
"You don't understand," Lilian hissed angrily.
"No, I don't. Because I don't have a family. And – and I think it's wrong that you and Hermione are screwing up the ones you've got!" The last sentence burst out of her without thinking, and more forcefully than she would have said, if she had meant to. It was loud enough that Hermione overheard.
"What did you just say?" she asked, turning to glare at the younger girl.
Mary felt herself growing wide-eyed and slightly light-headed as she realized what she had said, and to whom, but she wasn't about to back down. She hadn't been able to put her finger on exactly what was irritating her so much about the Grangers' situation until now, but now that she had, she felt… relieved. Anxious, too, because she was pissing off both of her closest friends, but she was certain that she had figured out what seemed, at least to her, to be the real problem.
"You heard me," she said, as strongly as she could manage. "You and Lilian are both screwing up, and… and it bothers me," she added in a rush. She was not at all accustomed to admitting that something was bothering her, but it was true, and Lilian had told her that if something was bothering her she should change it, to get what she wanted instead, so she would. This was important.
"I don't really think it's any of your business," Hermione said coldly.
Lilian was just staring at her in shock.
Mary hesitated for a long moment. "It is, though," she said, quietly. "You two are my friends, and you're hurting yourselves and your families, and that's wrong."
"I am doing no such thing!" the brunette snapped, raising her nose in a snit.
"Yes, you are!" Mary snapped back, taking refuge in anger on behalf of Emma and Dan. "You don't get it. Your parents love you. They want more than anything to be a part of your world, and you're just… jealous, or something, that you can't have magic all to yourself, and you keep pushing them away, and it pisses me off! Emma and Dan are good people – they don't deserve to be treated like, like muggles who don't belong just because you want to be – what? More independent? You don't like that they changed the house without telling you, I get that, but they meant it to be a surprise! Not speaking to them about it is just… petty! It's petty and immature, and you need to just get over yourself.
"And you!" she added, rounding on the now-gaping Lilian before Hermione could respond. "You are so worried about hurting Aerin and making her hate you and herself that you're pushing her away, just like your parents! Instead of trusting that she'd get over it eventually and you two could be real sisters again, you're just taking that chance away from her, and that's not helping either of you! You're right, I did think it was better not to tell her when I thought things would go back to normal between you two, but they haven't, and it's bothering you, I can tell!"
"I –" Hermione started, but Lilian cut her off.
"Shut up, Jeanie! Lizzie's right – you're being selfish. Oh, boo hoo. Your parents didn't ask you what you thought about them getting involved in our world. They remodeled without telling you. You have to share your room for a few weeks. You don't have their undivided attention anymore. If you don't pull your head out of your arse, they really will start to like Liz more than you. That's what you're afraid of, isn't it?" she sneered. Hermione was staring at the two of them now, open-mouthed, with tears in her eyes, but Lilian didn't notice. She was busy turning on Mary, her tone twice as vicious.
"You have some nerve!" she spat. "You don't have any idea what this is like! Aerin and I killed my brother, Lizzie! And I can't tell anyone I know that I did it – my parents would hate me even more, and it would fucking break Aerin to know she had a hand in it! She'd hate me for not telling her sooner, and for telling her at all! She'd hate herself as much as I hate myself, and I can't do that to her! She's my sister! But you wouldn't know what that's like, would you?"
No, my only living relatives are an evil, undead dark lord, a creepy, escaped horcrux that sent me a birthday present, and a godfather who apparently escaped from fucking Azkaban to kill me! I spent ten years living with people who hated me and treated me like a fucking house elf. I don't have any idea what it's like to be part of a dysfunctional non-family!
She almost said it. It was on the tip of her tongue. But she didn't trust Lilian to keep the Evil, Undead Grandfather thing a secret if it came out when they were in a fight. "You're right," she said instead, coldly. "I wouldn't. You two ungrateful bitches are the closest thing I've ever had to sisters. But I'd like to think – I'd like to think," she repeated, over Hermione's attempt to interrupt her, "that if I did have a family, I wouldn't take my parents" (she glared at the eldest of their trio) "or my siblings" (she shifted her glare back to Lilian) "for granted!"
"Ha!" Hermione practically shouted at her. "You think I'm the one taking them for granted? They're the ones who don't ever think about what I want! Yes, they want to be a part of our world, but they're not! The only reason they even know about magic is because of me, and –"
"And what?" Lilian interrupted her, red faced and furious. If Mary had to guess, she would have said that she was mostly angry at Mary, but Hermione had drawn her ire for distracting her from Mary's criticism. "You think that means they need your permission to get involved? You're fourteen. They're your parents. Do you know what I would give to have parents who actually gave a shit what I was learning or wanted to be involved in my life?"
"You were on my side earlier!" Hermione objected angrily.
"No, I was being polite and being a good friend, letting you bitch and moan about your so-called problems, but as long as we're getting it all out there, Lizzie's right! You do take your parents for granted! It doesn't matter what you want, they're going to do what's best for you because they care."
"And that means not giving a shit about me personally, does it?" Hermione asked scathingly.
"They do care about you personally!" Mary corrected her. "You just won't let them show you because they've pissed you off!"
"If they cared, they would ask me what I thought of their getting involved in my life – they wouldn't just make choices without consulting me!"
Lilian was laughing, slightly hysterically. "You know who you sound like, Hermione? Draco. 'Oh, my parents give me everything I could possibly want, but Father never really spends any time with me, and Mother never leaves me alone. My life is so hard,'" she mimicked him, then did Hermione: "'Oh, my parents are going ridiculously out of their way to keep involved in my life and not lose me to the magical world, like so many muggleborns' families do, and they write me letters all the time about their latest political gambits and their experiments and their lives, but they made a major sacrifice for me without telling me about it, which is just unacceptable and completely overbearing.' The two of you should get together and have an entitled little pity party!"
Hermione couldn't seem to form words to rebut the Malfoy comparison. She stuttered for a moment before choking out, "You don't understand," much as Lilian had done earlier. There were tears in her eyes again, whether from anger or frustration Mary didn't know. The Ravenclaw threw herself into an armchair and stared moodily at the flames flickering before her.
"Then explain it to us, genius, because from where I'm standing, you're still looking like a selfish blond twat!" Lilian snapped, merciless in her desperation to avoid dealing with her own familial drama. Mary hadn't missed that she had completely turned the attention away from herself, but she hoped that she would at least think about what Mary had said later.
"My entire life has been one long series of Mum butting in and taking over everything! I've never been allowed to do anything by myself! Going to Hogwarts was the first time I ever spent a night away from home. Magic was supposed to be mine! My chance to do something that didn't have her fingerprints all over it! And now she's forcing her way into the wizarding world, too. It's not fair! I just wanted one thing that was mine, and I can't even have that!"
"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say," Lilian said, but Mary was thinking back on everything she knew of the Grangers. She suddenly recalled her thought on entering Lilian's room, that it was nothing like Hermione's, because the only sign of Hermione's personality in her room was her collection of books, most of which had to have been bought for her by her parents, anyway. Emma was not altogether different from Aunt Petunia, she realized, at least in the way they both controlled every aspect of their children's lives. It was an unsettling thought, finding a similarity between her favorite and least favorite women in the world.
"I told you that you wouldn't get it!" Hermione huffed.
Mary sat gingerly on one of the other chairs, a rather spindly one that seemed to go with the tea-table in the corner. "You're blowing this out of proportion," she said, as calmly as she could. "Just because they're involved doesn't mean they're completely taking over everything. And besides, I thought you wanted them to help get rid of Binns!"
Hermione shook her bushy head fiercely. "It's not just about that! It's – my life as a witch and my life as a muggle were separate, and now they're not! I wanted – needed this holiday to be a break from the magical world! It was supposed to be normal. And now it's not, and they didn't even warn me!" There were tears leaking down her cheeks, now. She wiped them away with a sleeve, viciously, and pulled her feet up into the chair, burying her face in her knees. "Just… just leave me alone, please."
Lilian and Mary exchanged a look. All the fight seemed to have gone out of Lilian as she saw Hermione's shoulders begin to shake silently. She nodded, and led Mary toward the door, closing it firmly behind them.
Mary leaned against the wall, arms crossed, breathing deeply and trying not to lose it herself.
"I think you might have been right about the time turner."
She looked up. Lilian was looking at the closed door with concern.
"When I thought the worst that could happen was a breakdown, I wasn't expecting… this," the older girl added.
"Stop changing the subject," Mary said, suddenly exhausted.
"What?" Lilian sounded genuinely confused.
"Aerin. Connor. Either you have to tell her, or you have to find a way to get over it. I'm serious."
The blonde tried to brush her off. "It's okay. We're fine."
"You guys are acting like me and Dudley used to – like you're not family, you just happen to live together," Mary told her baldly. "You're not okay. You have to do something, because this secret is tearing your family apart, and I don't even think you see it."
"And what would you know about it?" Lilian snapped, defensively.
"About how a secret can tear a family apart?" she asked rhetorically, letting her hatred of the Dursleys, and her longing for a real family show on her face. "More than you might think."
She turned on her heel and stalked away, before Lilian could answer. If she had looked back, she might have seen something like sorrow on her friend's face, but she didn't. She found an unoccupied room and sat contemplating a wet, grey garden outside the darkened window until an elf came to fetch her for supper, lost in thoughts of her long-gone parents, and what her life might have been like if they had lived.
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Later that evening, long after Hermione and Mary had returned to the Grangers', Mary lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Hermione, emotionally exhausted, had gone to bed almost at once, while Mary related the afternoon and evening's events to the adults in the vaguest of terms. She wasn't comfortable telling Hermione's parents why she was so upset, seeing as it involved them, so she glossed over the three of them having had an argument, without elaborating on the details. She still hoped that Hermione would talk to them herself, and soon, or at least get over her temper tantrum, breakdown, whatever it was. She didn't know what she could do to help, other than what she had just done, pointing out that it was a problem.
She had been glad that the older girl was already asleep when she finally went to bed, but as she lay in the dark, listening to the sound of her friend tossing and turning, she couldn't help but wonder if there was any truth in the accusation Lilian had made, that Hermione was afraid her parents liked Mary better than her. She secretly thought she had been acting like a better daughter to them since they had arrived for the holiday, but she would never say it. She hoped Hermione didn't believe it either.
Her feelings of unease weren't helped by the fact that she felt she had missed out, not having a big holiday ritual for the Powers. It wasn't as though there would have been one at school, anyway, seeing as almost everyone had left, but apparently two years was long enough for her to think of a pattern as a tradition, and the way things should be.
She wished she could have spent the day in quiet contemplation, rather than in uncomfortable, awkward silence and getting in a fight with her best friends. She knew what Hermione meant when she said that she had needed this break, and that it wasn't shaping up to be everything she had wanted, if only because it had just been so awkward and tense.
The past term – the past year, really, had put her through the wringer, and she truly felt she could have used the holiday – the real holiday – as an excuse to stop and take a day to consider how far she had come, and everything she had survived.
The Yule before had been horrifying, making her live through half a lifetime as her more-abused, more-reckless Gryffindor self, and she felt like she had hardly stopped moving since. It had just been one awful thing after the next, all year.
The Conspiracy – gods and Powers, that had been such a bad idea – had gotten under way as soon as the holiday ended, and the whole school had been living in fear for months between the attacks.
And then there had been the Chamber of Secrets itself. It still bothered her that she couldn't remember what had happened down there, for real. She still had that false memory, which was like adding insult to injury, taunting her about the fact that she didn't know what she had done.
Then she had found out about her mum and the Dark Lord, and Snape had basically told her that he ought to have treated her like a goddaughter all these years, but then it turned out that he had betrayed her in their very first detention, even though she hadn't wanted to believe he would. They hadn't really talked since, which wouldn't be strange – she didn't expect to talk to him, really – except she had tea with Remus every few weeks, and they just talked and caught up. She blamed him for throwing her whole idea of how she should expect adults to act all out of whack.
The Grangers had started their scheming over the summer, and Mary could see now how she was getting pulled further and further into the drama the family was building, both in Magical Britain, and with whatever Hermione's problem was. She vaguely recalled, now that she was thinking of it, that the idea had been floated of the Grangers adopting her, or taking on her muggle guardianship or something of the like, after she had run off and broken her arm over the summer. She wasn't sure what she would say, if they asked her if she wanted them to over the coming weeks. On the one hand, Emma and Dan were great, and Hermione was practically her sister already, but on the other, if Lilian was right, that might make things between Hermione and her parents even worse.
Speaking of guardians, though, she had had to see both Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon over the summer, which had been nearly as unpleasant as breaking her arm in the first place, or being lost and alone in the muggle hospital, or having to deal with Aunt Minnie afterward.
It was a little bit startling, even now, to realize how many adults she had in her corner, supporting her. The Professor had only been so angry because she cared, and Dan had stood up to her for Mary, and Emma had driven across the country and back to fetch her that night. Catherine had been worried, too, and had made it very clear that she was not ever to run away again. If she included Snape and Remus, both of whom had told her in the last year that they thought of her as the niece they had never had, she had three times as many almost-family members as she had had even a year ago. Lilian and Hermione had already been practically her sisters, but she wouldn't have thought to consider any of the adults something like family back then.
She knew she shouldn't count Riddle, wherever he was, but she couldn't help but wonder if the Parsel book he had sent for her birthday and/or Mabon meant that he wanted to claim her as family, too. It would have been nice to have someone she was actually related to by blood consider her family (if she ignored who he actually was, and the fact that she didn't know what had happened between them in the Chamber).
She knew it was out of order, since she had gotten ahead of herself, but she had to include the events of her birthday as one of the big things that had happened since last Yule. Sirius Black's escape had been inconvenient multiple times over the course of the last – had it only been five months? And she still didn't know what was going on with the weird Libra tattoo, or what had been going on in her Lammas vision. Or her Mabon vision, for that matter. It was awfully shitty of the Powers, she thought, to show her these teasing little hints and then not tell her what they meant.
She thought that the man who had accused Black in her Lammas vision might have been Pettigrew. She hadn't known his face, then, and it had faded in her memory over time, but thinking of the two scenes together, it would make sense. He was the one who had accused Black in real life, after all. She wished she knew what spells Lily had cast on them, all those years ago, and why they were important, because she was sure they were. If Hermione decided she was speaking to her again at any point this holiday, she might ask whether she had come across a description that sounded similar in any of her reading.
Once she had finally gotten back to school, her life had more or less exploded with minor stresses – all the Slytherin drama with Dave, and the Muggleborn Students' Association, and the Dueling Club, Quidditch, the flobberworms and the COMC and History Petitions, and dealing with Daphne's tea parties, Remus turning out to have been a werewolf all along, and the ever-present threat of the dementors. She couldn't wait to start learning the Patronus for real. Plus there was the ongoing mystery of what the hell was up with Snape and Remus, and Hermione's time turner drama, and their hundred hours of detention, which had just been cruel and unusual at every turn.
Like Hermione, she had been hoping that this break would be a well-needed respite from constantly dealing with one thing after the next, and so far it just wasn't. At all.
Several hours after she lay down, still unable to sleep, she rose from her bed and took her journal into the living room. She only wrote in it sporadically, and more often notes to herself than any sort of diary-entry, but it was half-past two, and there were too many ideas in her head for her to sleep.
She scribbled down her thoughts on everything she could think of that had happened over the past year and then, on re-reading them, decided that she couldn't keep them.
There were too many secrets there that anyone could find and use to get not only her, but her friends and Snape and Remus in trouble too.
She tore the pages free and headed toward the kitchen, intending to use her oil lamp to burn them over the sink, but then she had a better idea. She slipped on the boots Dan had left by the door and crept outside, shivering in the pre-dawn chill. A sharp breeze caught the pages as they burned, scattering the ashes and carrying them away as they fell. Mary watched a few red sparks flutter into the sky, until they faded away. "Here's hoping the next year is better," she muttered under her breath. Then she turned and hurried back to the warmth of her bed.
This time she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Crouch Townhouse, Birmingham
Bartemius Crouch Junior
Barty's hand twitched for the wand that wasn't there as the golden glow of his father's Imperius, the metaphorical bindings entrapping his mind, faded from his consciousness. He found himself literally bound to his chair, instead, stuck there, unable to stand, to flee.
"Let me go! Let me go, you motherfucking psycho!" he shouted at the man who sat at the other end of the dining table, helping himself to the Yule roast as though this – this disgusting parody of a normal family gathering wasn't exactly that. "Winky! Winky! Help me! Get me out of here!"
The elf gave him an all-too-sorry look, and he knew what her answer would be before she said it. He could probably have said it along with her: "Winky is sorry, Master Barty, but Winky cannot – Master Barty's father has forbidden it!" and she twisted an ear with her free hand, the other levitating the roast to his end of the table.
"Father, please, let me go!" he cried, ignoring the food as he struggled against the spell that held him. Unfortunately it was one that required a specific counter-curse, and he could not cast it wandlessly. The old man had learned his lesson about assuming his wandless Death Eater son was harmless the very first time he had released the Imperius: Bellatrix had made sure that each and every one of her trainees, no matter how incompetent, could manage a non-verbal, wandless finite of the sort that would cancel a simple immobilization jinx, and Barty had not been incompetent when it came to magic, no matter his other flaws as a son.
Homosexual, yes. He would, in all likelihood, be the last of the line. Fascinated by the Dark, yes. He could not remember a time when he was not more interested in how the crimes his father investigated were committed, rather than how they were solved. Disinterested in a ministry career? A capital sin in his father's eyes, and one to which he fully and unabashedly admitted.
He had always, always been brilliant at magic, though – he knew that. He had wanted to be a teacher – a professor – but teaching instead of doing isn't good enough for any son of mine – aren't Slytherins supposed to have ambition?
Then again, he wasn't the only Crouch who had failed to live up to the expectations of his so-called family. What kind of father broke his son out of prison, only to keep him locked up under an Unforgivable for the rest of his life, save when he wanted to act out some half-remembered fantasy of a time long-past? Especially after sentencing him to that hellhole in the first place to save his own job?! (The true irony of the situation, of course, was that Bartemius Crouch Senior had always cared more for his job than his son, and had never attended a Yule dinner with him before Azkaban.)
"Father – let me go! I promise, I'll disappear! I'll leave the country! No one will ever know!" That was a lie. If he ever got hold of a wand again, he would cast fiendfire, and burn this place to the ground – and preferably his father along with it. He thought it would be a well-justified response to… it had to be nearly ten years now, that he had been a prisoner in his one-time home. Eleven?
He had joined the Dark Lord partially because Lucius Malfoy had spoken persuasively – passionately – about freedom and rights and the good of all wizards. More than that, it had been the lure of forbidden knowledge, freely shared. But mostly it had been the fact that the Dark Lord and his followers were the first and only people in his life who had appreciated his intelligence and his potential, who made him feel welcome and accomplished. It was the same for several of the others – Liam Rosier and Severus Snape, at least, that he knew of – they had been among the outcasts of Slytherin, too focused on their own projects to engage as Slughorn would have had them do with their peers, their only salvation the positive interest of the darkest of their fellow students.
He had never been able to win his father's approval, but all the Dark Lord gave his freely, asking only loyalty in return.
Now, if – no, when (he had to believe it was when) – he escaped, he would seek out his fallen Lord – in part to prove that he had never lost or abandoned that loyalty, had never forsaken him, unlike the Malfoys and the Notts and Yaxleys and the rest of them, but mostly to spite the man who had never cared for him as aught but a thing to be kept and held against his will.
"Father, please, this isn't what she wanted! Mother never would have wanted… this!" Even the mention of his mother drew only the slightest flinch of a reaction from the man at the other end of the table. "She would think this – this whole farce – sick and wrong! You know it, Father! Please!"
Unlike his father, his mother had loved him – he knew that, now, though he hadn't truly realized it until she had made the ultimate sacrifice for him, changing places, taking his spot in Azkaban, suffering the dementors in his place. She had never stood up to Father for him, or supported his dreams, but she had done that – saving him from a fate worse than death, at the cost of her own life.
If there was one thing he regretted, now, it was that he had never believed her, before, when she had claimed her love for him. He had convinced himself that she didn't, that he wasn't betraying her as much as him in joining the Dark, but now… Now he wished he could have been a better son to her, if not to his father.
He should never have let her do it – her life wasn't worth his, not when this was all there was to it.
"Say something, you bastard!" he swiped the carving knife from the platter and hurled it the length of the table before his father could disarm him, but not before he shielded himself, the blade deflected harmlessly. It clattered to the floor, the house elf scurrying to pick it up.
Too slow, he thought. Too slow. Bellatrix's voice echoed in the back of his mind: "Poor ickle baby Barty… so sad and angry because nobody loves you… don't worry, we'll teach you how to make them pay…" and then "Again. Again! Too slow, baby Barty! Do it again!" endless repetition, endless training… she would, he thought, be disappointed that he hadn't managed to kill the bastard and escape by now.
Finally, the old man spoke, dabbing at his lips and lying his napkin aside. "I see you still do not repent your actions."
Barty scoffed. "Repent? Repent? Fancy yourself the Christian God, then? Shall I turn to you and beg you forgive me, and so have my sins wiped out? Beat at my breast and call my Lord's Mark the shame and disgrace of my youth? I have nothing to be sorry for, you hypocritical madman!"
That, at last, drew a reaction from the old man. "Nothing to be sorry for? How many men, women and children did you kill? How many did you torture on the orders of your so-called lord? How many Unforgivables have you cast? I should have let you rot in Azkaban! At least then your mother –" he broke off with a strained gasp, though he did not break down into tears. Barty wasn't sure he had it in him to cry.
He spat venom, ignoring the last, cutting comment. "I could ask you the same, father: How many men, women and children died because you would not leave well enough alone? Because you escalated a war you were neither prepared nor equipped to end? How many suffered because you failed to manage the unexpected consequences of your actions? I have cast fewer Unforgivables than you – if I deserve the dementors, you do as well, a hundred times over!"
It was not, after all, as though his father had the moral high ground.
In truth he had killed, and more than once, but only those who attacked him first, and only quickly, cleanly. His job had been to break wards, to open doors for his fellow soldiers. One could make the argument that he was as culpable as they, for they could not have acted without his help, but he knew that his father would not take responsibility for the Death Eaters' responses to his actions, so neither would Barty take the credit.
Both sides had committed atrocities in the War, he would admit, but he was a far sight less responsible for the actions of his fellow Death Eaters than his father was for the actions of the Aurors and Hit Wizards under his command.
The Aurors had been authorized to use the Unforgivables against suspected Death Eaters. The rights of prisoners had been suspended. There was no limit to the time a suspected Death Eater could be held without trial, and when they had been given a trial, it was a farce, designed to showcase his father's righteousness rather than determine the truth of events and assign punishment accordingly! The so-called Light had been no better than the Dark by the end of it, only proving their point that the Government was entirely corrupt, and determined to crush all semblance of freedom beneath its heel.
"I will give you one last chance, boy…" his father said, glaring.
Barty scowled mutinously. He had not been a boy for decades. "Just because you refuse to recognize your own culpability doesn't mean it isn't true!" he hissed – the last word before the Imperius struck, flying openly down the length of the table. It wasn't as though he could have dodged.
The vaguely pleasant, golden glow enveloped his mind, and the sweetest, most delightful of voices spoke, telling him to calm down and eat his dinner.
He did.
Why wouldn't he be calm? There was a niggling sort of thought at the back of his mind, as though he had just been thinking something, but had forgotten it all of a sudden, as he realized just how hungry he was. It probably wasn't important, if he had forgotten it so easily. He was vaguely aware of voices speaking, distantly, at the other end of the table, but they weren't any more important than whatever he had forgotten he was thinking about. He was far more focused on the meal before him, and the Voice telling him to return to his room when he was finished, to prepare for bed, to not even think of leaving the house, or doing anything to harm himself or his father.
"Enjoy your meal," the Voice said.
Barty smiled vaguely down the table, all worries and concerns vanished in an instant, in favor of appreciating the savor and tenderness of the meat, and the rich bouquet of the wine. The man sitting across the length of polished wood – his father, he recalled distantly – did not seem nearly so pleased with it, however. He stood abruptly and left the room without excusing himself.
Barty shrugged, calmly applying himself to his dinner.
"Blessed be, Master Barty," Winky whispered from the corner, her large, elfin eyes swimming with unshed tears. Then she whacked her head sharply against the wall for thinking ill thoughts about the young Master's father, but he took no notice, concerned only with the Imperius-enforced orders which once again encircled his mind with their deceptive golden chains.