You can all thank Cheryl for yelling at me on Twitter to update. Say it with me... "Thank you, Cheryl."
Harry sprinted across the tall grass of the slightly overgrown field. He had been forced to run fast many times in his life, but in his head, nothing would ever compare to this flat-out sprint across the Greene farm, the sound of the gunshot still ringing in his ears. Daryl was still on the ground when he got there, covered in blood and sweat and grime and...human ears.
"Is he...?" Harry asked. Daryl started moving before he could finish, and everyone except Harry took a step back for a moment, not sure if the person on the ground was still a person. Rick put his arm out and nudged Harry back gently.
Daryl reached up and touched his head, drawing away blood-coated fingertips. He looked up at the huddled group, squinting a little.
"I was kidding." The men helped him to his feet. His eyes fell on Harry, narrowed slightly. "And what were you gonna do, wizard boy? Gonna abracadabra me to death?"
Harry was too shocked at the situation to even find it funny that Daryl had inadvertently gotten an insult right for once. Or that Muggle fantasy lore had managed to get so close to the killing curse. By the time he recovered, the men were already dragging Daryl off. He was barely conscious, lolling a bit in their arms.
"He's wearing ears," Glenn said. Rick tore them off, muttered something about keeping it to themselves. He glanced back at Harry and gave him a significant look. Harry nodded.
"Oh God. Is he dead?" Andrea had come running. Harry thought of a lot of things he would have said to her if he was in charge.
Make sure the thing you're actually shooting at is dead. Don't shoot at something if live people are running toward it.
Even Harry had more sense than that, and he'd never really been around a gun besides Dudley's toy rifles. He still had the scars.
They carried Daryl to the farm house, most of the group following behind except for the women who were already in the house, working on dinner for the family.
"Stay out here," Rick said to him before they dragged Daryl over the threshold. Harry sat down on the porch swing. Andrea and Dale took the stairs, Andrea too stressed to notice Harry was still there. Dale merely glanced at him before consoling Andrea.
"Don't be too hard on yourself. We've all wanted to shoot Daryl."
Harry knew that Dale was trying to cheer her up, but something about it rubbed him the wrong way. Daryl saved him that night in the woods. He had spent all day looking for a lost child. Sure, he was a little coarse sometimes, but...
Maybe it was because Harry knew what someone truly unworthy of love was like. Maybe it was because Daryl was loner like Harry used to be before he found his place in the world, but he got the feeling now that most people in the group saw Daryl as an outsider—a stray cat they let stick around because it was good at catching mice—and it did not sit well with Harry. He got up and walked around to the side of the house, sitting down on a stack of firewood instead. A spider scurried across his hand and Harry sat it down gently on the ground.
Meanwhile, approximately 4200 miles (or 6700 kilometers) away, Barty Crouch Jr. knocked furiously on the door of a decrepit little shack. The house, if you could call it a house, sat wedged between two monolithic buildings in downtown London. Men and women in business suits streamed in and out of the buildings on either side, but no one seemed to notice the dilapidated little hut. In fact, to all of them, the shack may as well have not been there at all.
"I know you're in there." Barty's tongue flicked out from between his lips, a small tic he had developed as a toddler when he took to imitating a snake he found in the garden and kept for a pet. His mother had screamed when she found it. A simple flick of her wand, and the snake was gone forever. The tic, however, remained.
Barty pounded on the door again. The hinges creaked.
"Open the bloody door."
The door swung open, seemingly of its own accord. Bartemius stepped inside to pitch darkness. The door slammed shut behind him, robbing the house of any light.
"What do you want?" a voice rasped from somewhere to Barty's right.
"Lumos," Barty said. He found the old man sitting in a rocking chair next to an unlit fireplace. The wand light fell upon his eyes, the sockets empty and black. It was said in the darker circles of wizardry that Septimus Arkwright lost his eyes in a dark ritual. No one seemed to have any idea which ritual though. There was no spell or potion involving eyes in any known dark texts. Still, the fact of the matter was that if you needed to know how to do something, something outside the realms of normal magic, Septimus was the man to talk to if you could not be granted an audience with Voldemort himself.
"I need to find someone."
Septimus laughed, a husky cackle.
"Is it a woman?" he asked, laughing again, the corners of his empty eye sockets crinkling. That had to be a new record. Less than two minutes, and Barty already wanted to avada him. Usually it took ten.
"It's a boy."
"A boy, or THE boy?"
"The." Barty slumped down in an armchair. Dust puffed up around him, forcing him into a coughing fit. The old man waved his hand in Barty's general direction and the dust in the air disappeared.
"There is a limitation to location spells. No doubt your master has already tried to find him."
"This is different," Barty said.
"That's what they always say," Septimus said. "Go on."
"I-"
"I see," Septimus cut him off.
Barty resisted the urge to point out that the old man could not see anything. Septimus laughed.
"No, I suppose I can't."
"Get out of my head," Barty ordered. The old man smiled, half of his teeth gone.
"You're thinking of crucioing me right now. You very much want to. Go on. I can't even feel it." He held his arms wide, an invitation for Barty to cast any spells he wished.
Get out of my head!
"Very well. Very well." The man went quiet for a moment. "So you botched a portkey. Now that is a different matter indeed."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"Oh yes. The ministry thinks there are no ways of tracing a portkey, especially a botched one, but there certainly are," Septimus said. "I presume that is the wand you used?"
"Yes," he said.
"I'll need it."
"What?" Barty's tongue flicked out twice.
"You will give it to me, and you will wait here." There was no smile or laugh this time.
"No. You will show me how to... do whatever it is you're doing."
"Oh no," the old man said, finally getting up from his chair. "I'm afraid that won't work for me at all." He shook his head. "No, not at all. And to answer the question you're currently forming, Voldemort has not killed me yet, because he can not kill me. I am as immortal as he is, perhaps even more so." The old man held his hand out. "He did try very hard. Tried even harder to get me to tell him why he couldn't do it."
Barty reluctantly put the wand in the old man's hand. Septimus walked into the other room of the two-room home, leaving Barty in the dark once more.
It was only a few moments before he returned, carrying the wand in one hand and a tiny porcelain doll in the other. He held the wand up for a moment, as though he was looking at it, inspecting it.
"In my day, we used staffs. Much more stylish, albeit harder to conceal." Septimus placed the wand back in Barty's hand. "Then that pesky Ollivander came around, touting his magical core nonsense. Wizards don't need a magical core. We are the magical core." He tutted. "A staff is supposed to be a training tool, not a crutch. If we needed a magical core, we wouldn't be able to do things like this." Barty's chair unceremoniously dumped him onto the floor, his hands sliding through layers of dust.
He sat up, slowly, tongue flicking between his lips almost uncontrollably. He said his next words through his teeth.
"Right, and about my little problem?"
"Ah, yes, of course. Take this, click your heels three times, and say, 'there's no place like home.' Lovely books, those, by the way. All about a wizard who isn't really a wizard." Septimus held out the porcelain doll. "The witches are really witches, however. Well, I suppose they aren't really witches since they're fictional..." Barty glared at him, dusted his hands on his pants, and grabbed the doll before he had to listen to any further musings.
The house around him blurred, and then he felt as though he was being squeezed through a tube the size of a silver sickle. It was simultaneously nothing at all and everything at all like apparition and portkeying. Moments later, the air seemed to spit him out into the middle of a patch of forest. Next to him were the half-eaten remains of the boy who was not Harry Potter. A few feet away lied the Triwizard trophy, covered in dried blood and ash. Barty paled a little. If anything had happened to Harry Potter, he would be killed instantly...if he was lucky. Tortured into insanity and then killed if he wasn't.
But Harry's body was not here. He had to be alive. The pesky boy had a knack for not dying. Barty got up and dusted himself off, performed a few cleaning charms. He threw in a cooling charm when he noticed the stifling heat pooling on his skin. He started to walk, following a trail cut through the dead leaves on the ground. He had to hope it would lead him to the boy.
A few moments later, he glimpsed the white farmhouse through the trees. Even from the tree line, he could see Harry Potter walking across the porch and in through the front door. He watched. A few moments later, he came out with a plate of food and sat down on the porch steps, alone. Barty Crouch smiled and cast a disillusionment charm on himself, ready to run out and grab him so he could get him back to his master. He took a step forward.
Something growled behind him, the bushes shaking. Barty spun around quickly. Barty had seen a lot of gruesome things in his life of dark magic. He had seen severed heads in jars and victims sliced from head to toe and the tiny grotesque creature that was currently his master. But he had never seen anything quite like this—peeling flesh, mottled skin, lips dripping with blood and coated in bits of decay. He aimed his wand.
"Avada kedavra." The thing fell back but slowly got to its feet again. Barty cocked his head. Interesting.
"Sectumsempra." The thing's head severed clean off, teeth still gnashing when it fell to the ground, but the body went down, limp. Barty shrugged and started to turn back toward Harry. Then it clicked...Cedric's half eaten body... Old defense lessons and dark rumors crept their way to the surface of his brain, stories of zombies, of a plague created by dark magic. Corpses devouring people, infecting them. It was said to be a lost art. If he could take one of these things AND the boy back to his master, he would not only be forgiven for his mistake, he would be rewarded.
He turned back toward the farmhouse, ready to dart out and grab Harry, but the boy was gone. He sighed in frustration, calmed himself. No matter. He knew where he was now. He could wait for the boy to show. His tongue darted between his lips again. They curled into a smirk.