Barty steps into a nineteen year-old's bedroom, left unchanged from all those years ago when he had followed the Lestranges on their ill-advised venture.
Mother wouldn't have changed it, would have refused to undo the enchantments on the ceiling while her son rotted in Azkaban. The spellwork now gleams with the night sky's stars spiraling out while the real blue sky shines through the window. The stars shine so much clearer than the haze weighing down on Barty's head.
He set up that enchantment himself, didn't he? The moment that he was of age and could cast whatever magic he pleased, Barty remembers drawing the runes himself upon simple plaster as he tried to capture the night on the ceiling.
Not quite as grand as the ceiling at Hogwarts, but it's Barty's own work glimmering alive above him. Father didn't erase it like he did his own son. Didn't want to go against the wishes of his wife and wipe the memory of her son's existence away like he wiped away the boy himself.
Photos eye him curiously from their places above bookshelves. They've been watching him for years as he sat on that cursed bed in the corner, spending hours each day staring more lifelessly than even the still portraits that Muggles own.
A quidditch chaser waves from his place standing next to the Quidditch cup. His windswept, strawberry blonde hair forever captured by the snap of a camera. The boy flashes his older counterpart a grin as their eyes meet, seemingly happy that someone is finally seeing him after so many years.
Barty drags his gaze away, the world still moving so slowly under the haze that tries to press him back under.
The bookshelf underneath that portrait holds…History. Muggle history, his little project in fifth year when he had tried to describe muggle society during the time when Grindelwald had been waging a secret war around them. The muggle's had their own war, surely not as great without magic until… Those books spoke of gas chambers, of cities wiped off the face of the Earth as muggles harnessed power the way that no wizard dared. Cruelty and terror beyond anything imaginable.
That year, before the Easter break, Barty had spoken with a seventh year prefect. Stalked him during his patrolling duties until the older student had finally whipped around, wand in hand and a sneer marring his face. Asking if the little Ravenclaw had gotten lost sneaking to the library.
Some of the students knew, not concretely, but the rumors were enough to whittle down who among them may be Death Eaters. Not officially yet, but after graduation, you could almost always tell who was most likely to accept that mark upon their arm the night they stepped off the Hogwarts Express for the last time.
The prefect Evan Rosier looked as if Barty had cursed him right there in the halls when he asked if it was true, if muggles really could do those things? Or did people follow the Dark Lord because they were stupidly concerned with who married who? Did they care more about stepping on muggleborns than the true threat looming over them?
It was telling how many Ravenclaws slipped into the Death Eaters ranks. How many of them must have asked the right questions to the right students in Hogwarts. The numbers were nowhere near that of the Slytherins, but Bary knew more than a few that had already joined the same way before him.
Was he the last one? The last Ravenclaw who realized how crucial the Dark Lord truly was before he fell?
The questions slip in, the thoughts and memories pressing against the haze, lifting it up just enough to breathe. To tremble, to dig his hands into his hair as the pain screams through his scalp.
"Master Barty! Winky is here, what's wrong?!" The house elf's hands are on his hunched shoulders. Her eyes wide and terrified as Barty's knees throb against the floor and his throat burns.
He fell, he's been falling forever. Buried further and further underneath the pleasantness curdling around him.
"My books," the world's swimming around him, Winky's blurred and out of focus. "I haven't…" Barty hasn't read in years, hasn't reminded himself of what the world contains, lost out of sight to history. When was the last time he's seen the world even, the outside? Felt the wind in his hair as he flew. His quidditch mates around him as their brooms whistled through the air with the speed to outrun everything.
Bubbling up like a burst boil, a fragment of a moment, walking outside in the yard with Winky because she fought to insist that the young master needs to stretch his legs. To walk out of sight of everyone under both the darkness of night and of the invisibility cloak smothering him almost as much as the haze.
His feet had been rooted to the ground as the night sky spun free above him.
With a whisper of power, a book appears in Winky's hands while wisps of an elf's magic still slip off its cover. A muggle story, the same one that Mother read once for her own fifth year project, spinning muggle literature into an essay of excitement and love for their tales.
She gifted it to Barty the Christmas of his second year. An enticing argument for him to take up Muggle Studies as an elective. To share with her one of the things she loved most, an entire world of tales that most wizards never read.
Barty never explained it. Never told her the truth about the muggles. He never shared with her his hatred for the cruelty that lurked in minds behind those fanciful stories.
She's still dead, suffering all the way to the end. Dragged into a war that she never should have been. Because Father. Father couldn't help himself. Couldn't just pretend for her sake like Barty did. Couldn't pretend that…what? What was it?
The question sinks as Barty clutches onto a book that somehow ended up in his hands. The floor's hard and cold against his side as he stares at the title carved upon its surface: The Good Doctor by Charles Dickens.
Mother's book. This was Mother's gift to him. That memory refuses to sink back under the haze wearing Barty down, refuses to give up crawling back to the surface even as Barty spends the hours trembling on the floor as his stars stare down on him.