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lomonaaerenTitle: The Heavens Appall
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Barty Crouch, Jr./Harry, mentions of canon background pairings
Content Notes: AU during GoF, violence, gore, torture, unreliable narrators, present tense, underage, corruption, grooming
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: Harry finds out that at least one adult believes that he didn’t put his name in the Goblet of Fire. He thinks of Alastor Moody as a mentor at first, and the only person who knows what’s really going on. The first part doesn’t last long.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. Rohanza asked for a Harry/Barty fic. Warning that this fic is extremely dark, for all that the narrators don’t think so, and while not featuring sexual contact between Harry and Barty, does feature an underage and dysfunctional relationship. Read with caution. This will have at least two parts.
The Heavens Appall
“Why are you crying, then?”
That voice sounds like Professor Moody’s, and so does the scrape of the wooden leg across the stone floor. Harry frantically dries his tears and stands up. He came all the way to the top of the Astronomy Tower to cry. He didn’t think anyone else would be up here.
They’re probably still in the Great Hall, exchanging badges and whispering about him.
“Nothing, sir,” Harry mumbles, and tries to move past Moody. But the man reaches down and puts his hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry has to stop.
Both eyes are fastened on him. He can feel the magical eye. He refuses to look up.
“Well, now,” Moody says softly, “I understand why you are. But there’s better things to do than cry, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” Harry mutters, and shrugs angrily. Moody’s hand just rides his shoulder up and back down again. “But no one but my friend Hermione believes I didn’t put my name in the Goblet, and maybe Professor Dumbledore—and even he was looking at me like—” Harry cuts himself off. He can’t betray that kind of thing in front of a professor he barely knows.
“I believe you, too.”
Harry stares at him. “You do?” Moody said something like that right after his name was announced, Harry thinks, but Harry didn’t pay it a lot of attention. Not as much attention as Ron turning away from him, Hufflepuffs glaring at him, Malfoy with one of those stupid badges—
Harry cuts the thought off.
“Yes,” Moody says. “Let’s say, it seems a lot more likely to me that someone is trying to kill you, like those Death Eater remnants, than a fourteen-year-old getting past Dumbledore’s Age Line.” For a moment, thick disgust coats his voice. Then he continues in a milder tone, “Or you bribing someone older to put your name in.”
Harry nods. He feels a bit better. “Thank you, Professor Moody. I just—”
“Yes?”
“Wish that there’s some way I could show everyone I didn’t cheat. And I can survive. I don’t want to win. Just survive.”
Moody watches him for a long moment, magical eye whizzing around his head to check out the other battlements. Then he says, “Why don’t you come to my office for a bit?”
*
Barty watches Potter settle into a chair in front of his desk, and wonders.
Potter isn’t enjoying his rise to further fame. Barty didn’t necessarily expect him to; no child would like being isolated from his friends. Barty remembers the Ravenclaws who isolated people like that, and the Slytherins.
He smiles inside as he remembers what he did to them in return.
But from what dear Severus said, from what the rumors in the Ministry he visited in Moody’s guise murmured, and from the gossip of the other students, Barty realizes now that he expected someone who would be arrogant about it. Not a child crying in corners.
It intrigues Barty. It reminds him of someone. Several someones.
“Do you want tea?” he asks, and Potter nods. Barty keeps the magical eye fixed on the boy as he prepares the tea. Potter glances around his office once, but otherwise sits in his chair and goes back to staring at his hands.
This won’t do. Barty needs the boy curious and awake to the advantages of his position, willing to seek out solutions at least enough to make sure that he competes well in the Tasks. Yes, Barty can help him and mentor him and urge him along to the right solution, but he can’t act too openly, not in a school with Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore and Igor Karkaroff.
(Ravening hatred sweeps through him at the thought of Albus Dumbledore, his Lord’s enemy, and turns into mind-destroying hatred with the thought of Snape and Karkaroff, the traitors. Barty touches it, strokes it, and dismisses it back to its lair to wait until it’s needed).
That means that Barty will have to take a more active role behind the scenes, and remind the boy of some home truths.
“Why do you let them get to you like that?” he asks, hearing the question in Moody’s gruff tone and judging it good as he hands the boy his teacup. “They’re wrong, and you know they’re wrong. Why not disregard them and just do what you have to do to survive?”
“Because it would be one thing if it was just the Slytherins doing it or something, Professor,” the boy mutters, staring into his teacup and not drinking. He’s also far too thin, Barty thinks, the magical eye allowing him to see hollows of skin and bone that he couldn’t if he were wearing purely human eyes. “I’m used to them getting upset about me. But it’s my friends. And people who didn’t like me much, but—it’s been a few years since they were so hostile. The Hufflepuffs, I mean.”
“What were the Hufflepuffs hostile about, lad?” Barty lifts his own teacup, full of tea doctored with Polyjuice Potion, and takes a long pull.
Potter glances up at him in what looks like disbelief, then blushes and looks away again. “Right. You weren’t here then. Sorry, sir.”
“No need for apologies,” Barty says, and smiles the right width, not letting it crater the way it wants to. “Just tell me.”
“They thought I was the Heir of Slytherin,” Potter sighs, and kicks his ankles. If he notices Barty’s choke or stillness—which he doesn’t, because the first one is inside and the second one he’s looking away from—he gives no sign of it. “There were messages in blood being written on the walls about the Heir of Slytherin and people being Petrified, and they thought I was one because I’m a Parselmouth.”
This time, Barty starts, the tea in his cup audibly sloshing. Potter looks up at him, eyes like little twin suns of ice. “What?” Barty asks hoarsely.
Potter’s mouth pinches. “Are you going to be weird about it, too?” he mutters, and then seems to decide that that isn’t appropriate for a good little boy to say. He looks off to the side. “Sorry, sir.”
“No, tell me more about this,” Barty says, perhaps more insistently than he should. But he has to say it. He reaches out a hand towards Potter, pulls it back (not the right hand, not the hand that should be reaching). “I don’t care that you’re a Parselmouth. I just want to know.”
Potter studies him, then shrugs. “I didn’t even know I was a Parselmouth until Malfoy set a snake on me and it tried to attack another student. I commanded the snake to stop, but everyone thought I was egging it on. I don’t know, it just sounds like English to me. And then the Hufflepuffs whispered about how evil I was, ‘cause the student the snake tried to attack was a Hufflepuff, and then he got Petrified.”
“And the end of it?” Barty whispers (is there an end? Is there a rising end?)
Potter shrugs. “One of my best friends got Petrified. Hermione Granger. She had figured out the monster was a basilisk, though. And we knew where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets probably was. Ron and I. We went down there when the message said that a student was taken. But there was a rockfall because, uh, well, the professor we tried to take with us wasn’t very cooperative. And I was left alone. I went through and found the Chamber of Secrets and killed the basilisk.”
“How?”
“With the Sword of Gryffindor. And I killed the diary that was possessing, um, a student, and opening the Chamber of Secrets, too.”
Barty notes the omission, but his mind is far away, flying on wings of wonder. A basilisk. There was a basilisk in the school. Potter killed it. Potter is a Parselmouth. He survived.
“How would you like,” Barty says slowly, “to learn some real magic that might let you survive this Tournament?”
*
Harry carefully slides Wonders of the Darker Arts into the bottom of his bag, and walks to the Gryffindor table.
People are still sneering at him, and wearing badges, but it bothers him less than it used to. Harry had to realize that Professor Moody is right. People are going to sneer at him no matter what, Professor Moody says, because they don’t have Harry’s fame or his power. It’s not like Harry can share those things, either, just like his classmates can’t help being stupid or weak. So he just has to ignore it.
Harry did try to argue when Professor Moody talked about power yesterday. “I know I’m famous. But I’m not powerful.”
“Why not, lad?”
“I mean…” Harry feels a little lost. No one’s ever asked him that before. “Because powerful people can make other people do what they want,” he finally settles on. “I can’t even make people here stop laughing at me, or believe that I didn’t cheat. That means that I’m weak no matter how much fame I have. Other people use that fame, not me.”
Professor Moody chuckled darkly and leaned forwards to sip from his flask the way he always did. “Now, Potter, there’s other ways to think of power, you know. What about magical power?”
“It took me months to master the Patronus Charm last year—”
“And most other people couldn’t have done it at all, at your age.” Professor Moody’s eyes gleamed, both of them focused on Harry. Harry used to be kind of unnerved by that, but it’s become a comfort. “Think about that, not how long it took you. And you killed a basilisk!”
“With help.”
“You’re a Parselmouth, lad! That’s a power all its own.”
Harry shuffled his feet on the carpet when Professor Moody said that, and looked at him. “You don’t think it’s—I don’t know, something that only Dark wizards have? Something it wouldn’t be a better idea not to have?”
Professor Moody laughed until his eyes crinkled, although he didn’t actually start crying the way Harry thought he would for a minute. “It’s something they’re afraid of,” he said when he stopped laughing, circling a hand so Harry knew he was talking about the school. “Just like they’re afraid that you put your name in the Goblet and they’re afraid of Dementors because they can’t do anything about them. But do you have to suffer the same fear? Why should you, when you can talk to the snake in its den?”
“Well, I thought you would disapprove…”
“Because, Potter? Why?”
“Because you’re a famous Dark wizard catcher. Anything that makes it seem like someone could be Dark—”
“You listen here.” Moody leaned forwards then, his magical eye rotating around his entire face. “What matters is that you get to survive and hunt down Dark wizards. It doesn’t matter so much how you do it, except you have to learn effective and useful spells. Did you know that the Aurors got permission to use the Unforgivables during the war with—You-Know-Who?”
“They did?” Harry stared at Moody. It seemed outrageous to him that people on the good side would be using those spells to control other people’s minds and torture them and kill them, even if the ones they were doing it to were Death Eaters.
“They did.” Moody nodded firmly, and both his eyes came back and focused on Harry again. “Look up any history of the war, lad, you’ll see. And if Aurors could do that—if I could do that, and still remain a good person—” he chuckled “—then why would you be worried about it? You were a monster-killer at twelve years old! You defeated dozens of Dementors out of pure love!”
Harry flushed. Then he reached out and took the book Moody offered him.
“This’ll tell you about the real magic,” Moody said, and winked at him with the magical eye, which made Harry jump a little. “What matters is your destination, not the road you take to get there, Potter? But a word of advice…”
“Yeah?” Harry was already stroking the book’s cover, feeling as if it was shifting softly beneath his touch, longing to open it and look at the contents.
“Let’s keep it between us, for now,” Moody said, and propped a seamed finger up in front of his lips. “I got permission from Professor Dumbledore to teach you the Unforgivables, but not everyone even approves of that. You ought to have seen some of the Howlers I got.” He chuckled. “And in the meantime, there are people who would think that it’s not fair for me to be giving you that.” He nodded at the book. “As if the person who put you in the Tournament cares about fairness, with your being three years young and all.”
Harry smiled. He liked the idea of secrets. No one believed him about the Goblet. Well, fine, then, he just wouldn’t tell them the truth about this, either. “Don’t worry, Professor. I’ll keep it secret.”
Now, as Hermione slides into the seat beside him and begins some determined chatter that Harry knows is meant to hide the fact Ron isn’t coming, all Harry can think is that she probably wishes she knew magic like this. Harry’s already begun practicing it, and he can cast it. He can make bricks blacken and shatter, and the floor curl up and weep blood. He’ll be prepared no matter what the First Task has.
Maybe he is powerful, after all.
*
Barty sits behind Moody’s skin in the stands watching the dragons, and sits behind his own skin watching Potter as he walks onto the grass, ready to face them.
Face the Hungarian Horntail, its spikes glowing like the end of the beginning, its mouth open and its teeth like frozen Cutting Curses.
(Barty had a job to make sure Potter knew about the dragons, but he managed it. And now Potter walks forwards).
Potter lifts his wand. People lean in around Barty, and he smiles the smile that doesn’t reach the lips or the eyes or the skin, and takes another sip of Polyjuice from his flask.
“Gelo oculos!”
Barty opens his mouth in what the witless will take for a gasp soundless. Yes, that is a good spell, he thinks, as he watches the curse fly and lodge in the dragon’s eyes, freezing them and then popping them with crisp sounds. The dragon screams, the scream soothing something flayed in the depths of Barty’s soul, and rears, clawing at her nose. Potter darts in and grabs the golden egg, freezing some of the dragon’s scales when her hind paw comes down too near him.
The Freezing Eye Curse is also a curse, and there will be people who recognize it and hate it and scold Potter for it. And of course, scolded, he will withdraw further from others, and closer to the only adult who has pretended to care for him.
Barty smiles like a tiger choking.
(There will be a reckoning. There will be so much of a reckoning. Barty dreams of breaking the necks of the people seated in front of him, of drowning them in fire fiercer than any dragon’s).
*
“Harry, how could you? That poor dragon was just trying—”
“To eat me, yeah,” Harry snaps, cradling the fractured wrist that he got grabbing the egg and sprinting away from the dragon and falling on a sharp stone that he didn’t even notice buried in the grass.
Ron and Hermione are in the tent with him, and both of them are staring at him with wide eyes and reddened faces. Harry glares at Ron. He doesn’t even know why Ron is here. Why? What, he couldn’t get his scolding and sneering done from far away anymore, so it had to be up close?
“You could have used something else to stop her!” Hermione looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “Even the Conjunctivitis Curse would be better than that! Or Transfiguration like Cedric did—”
“Transfiguration like I haven’t learned yet?” Harry leans back against the pillow behind him and tries to resist the temptation to close his eyes. Professor Moody mentioned how much the Dark curses take out of you in battle situations, when you can’t just fall back a step and recover but have to run and dodge. But that’s one reason that Harry has to practice them some more, not just give up on them. Voldemort isn’t going to stand around politely and wait for him to recover like a neighbor who didn’t live on Privet Drive.
“You could have used something else!” Ron is waving his arms. “Mate, you should have known—”
“I don’t need to be lectured by someone who thought I was cheating all along,” Harry snaps.
Ron’s face turns red. “Yes, you do! If you’re going to fling Dark Arts around like it’s Knuts you’re dropping on the ground—oh, that’s right, I forgot, you can probably afford Galleons, can’t you, Mr. Wealthy—”
“I was never wealthy because I wanted to be! I was wealthy because my parents were bloody murdered!”
“You don’t have to flaunt it, either! Just like you don’t need to cast that kind of magic—”
“I’ve barely bought anything in the past few years when I could have because you would have been jealous—”
“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Wealthy, I didn’t know having me around was restricting you so much. Shall I go away so that you can just eat your next meal off golden plates? What about si—”
“Stop it!” Hermione shouts.
Harry turns around and glares at her. “And you. You couldn’t even worry about the fact that I could have been burned alive or I’m injured, could you? No, you just have to start scolding and lecturing me right away. Tell me, Hermione, would it have satisfied you if I’d burned to death? At least I would have died doing the right thing, huh?”
Hermione backs up a step, her face going pale. Guilt stabs Harry under the breastbone, but he remembers what Professor Moody told him.
She’s chosen her side, lad. Not her fault. What kind of life has she had? Innocent, entirely innocent. From what you told me, the worst thing that’s ever happened to her is being Petrified for a little while. You went and fought a basilisk in the same period of time. Would she have told you not to kill it? Probably. She would have told you to do lots of things. And they make sense, in her view of the world.
But her view of the world is limited.
So Harry keeps silent, and Hermione turns and runs out of the tent.
“That was bloody cold,” Ron says, sounding shocked. “How could you say that, Harry? You know that she just starts to lecture when she’s worried about people.”
Harry glares at Ron again. At least here he doesn’t have to worry about accidentally hurting someone who was supporting him. Ron hasn’t been supporting him for weeks, and he hasn’t said anything supportive now. Not even that he’s glad Harry didn’t bloody die.
What does it matter what magic Harry cast, if he survived? When he’s in a Tournament with a bunch of people three years older than he is who know all kinds of Dark magic and brilliant spells?
But then, Ron never believed Harry didn’t want to be here. He thinks Harry entered his name on bloody purpose.
“Yeah,” Harry says coldly, “and I know what you do when you’re worried about people, which is stay close and say you’ll be there until the end. But you haven’t done it this time. So you’re not worried about me, are you? Just Hermione and what I might achieve without you.”
Ron opens his mouth, shuts it again, and flushes violently. Then he leaves the tent without a word.
Harry leans back and closes his eyes. He doesn’t like the pain hammering under his breastbone. But isn’t it just a larger echo of the pain that’s been there since Ron disbelieved him about the Goblet? How can he keep either of his friends with him when he’s going to be entering more dangerous territory than either of them have ever walked?
(Really, in the end, this is about keeping them safe as much as himself. They might be horrified by Harry’s use of Dark magic, but they’ll be kept at a distance, and they can’t stop it any more than they can be tainted by it, at that distance).
*
Barty lifts his hip flask in a toast to the boy, as Potter steps through the door of his office. Potter checks and looks at him with a hectic flush on his cheeks. Barty laughs, as quiet as giraffes, and motions Potter further in.
(Further down and further in, leaping along, running and sprawling).
“So tell me,” he says, and pours tea with a dash of Firewhisky for Potter, seeing the way that it makes his flush turn into something like a fire, “what have your friends’ reactions been to your heroic endeavor in the First Task?”
As Barty suspected, Potter turns a dull, ugly red now. Barty frowns. Of course this is the way it should be and is and always would have been, but he does regret that Potter looks as if he’s been torn by the talons of the dragon he avoided when discussing his friends.
Barty…regrets the necessity, he thinks as he listens to Potter. Yes, those are the words he will not speak.
“And Hermione won’t talk to me and tried to report me to Professor McGonagall for evil Dark magic,” Potter finishes, dropping back against his chair and swallowing some of his tea. He doesn’t flinch from the Firewhisky at all, which Barty is grudgingly impressed by. “But Professor McGonagall told her that that curse is on the borders of illegal, not actually Dark—”
Barty conceals a smile. He suspects it’s more lion-clawed Minerva’s reluctance to punish her favorite student. “On the borders of illegal,” in this case, means on the wrong side.
“And now she just avoids me and stays with Ron all the time. Ron yells at me in the common room sometimes. The other Gryffindors act like they don’t know if they should applaud me or what.” Potter sneers. It’s a good sneer. Barty should know. “They still think I cheated.”
“Of course they do,” Barty says gently, in what he can when Moody’s voice is so poisonous to gentleness. “Lad, they’ll think now that you do know the kind of powerful Dark magic that could trick the Goblet.”
Potter’s lips form a silent expletive. Barty barks in laughter. “No need to hold in the swearing around me, boy. Do what you like.”
“Could you…”
Potter trails off. Curious, Barty leans forwards, and curses to himself as Moody’s leg scrapes across the floor like a dream of freedom. “Yes? What? Speak up, now.”
Potter looks up at him with large, wavering green eyes, not at all like the young wizard who cast a curse that deprived a dragon of her own sight. “Could you please not call me boy? My uncle does that. My Muggle uncle.”
Barty tilts his head. Such a prize of interest. “And you don’t like it.”
“I hate him.”
(That isn’t the question Barty asked-implied, but who is he to turn away the grace of such a delicious answer?)
“Then I shall not,” Barty says quietly. “I can keep calling you lad, or Mr. Potter. If you have a preference between those, you can choose.” He has to offer choices, too, to lead Potter down the path that will end in the night.
“Could you—call me Harry?”
Barty blinks the magical eye and gives himself a brief burst of shock like a firework. “You’d like me to do that?”
“Yeah.” Potter worries his bottom lip and then drinks more tea and Firewhisky. “I mean—I know you couldn’t do it in class, in front of the other students. But I’d like you to do it when you’re alone. Please? So that it feels—like I’m the one you want to talk to, not Potter the cheater or someone else you might have tutored.”
Barty resists the urge to cackle. This is excellent, so excellent. He toasts Potter again with his own teacup. “I am more than agreeable, Harry,” he says, and then grins, his own grin for all that it’s Moody’s mouth. Potter, smiling back, doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe assumes that that’s the way Barty’s smile was always supposed to look.
“You are indeed special among the ones I’ve tutored,” Barty goes on, and that’s true no matter which guise he carries. Potter is more interesting and important than the Ravenclaw and Slytherin students who came to Barty in his schooldays or the young Death Eaters he tried to show Dark magic to. And Moody can’t have trained as many Auror apprentices who were so quick to pick up Dark magic. “And now, a word of advice.”
“Yes, sir?” Potter’s sitting up in his seat, practically vibrating.
“None of that, now, bo—” Barty pauses deliberately. “Harry,” he acknowledges. “I do insist that you call me Alastor.”
“Yes, of course.” Potter’s eyes are as round as stars.
“That word of advice,” Barty begins. It’s as lucky (as opals) that neither Dumbledore nor Snape approached Potter after the First Task. They could have undone his plan. “You should realize that there exists an art called Legilimency, which will draw thoughts and memories out of your mind and render this arrangement of ours much harder to enjoy.”
“People can read my mind?”
“Yes, Harry. And two of those people are your least favorite teacher and your favorite Headmaster.”
Harry’s eyes craze with betrayal, and Barty smiles and drinks from his hip flask.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Barty Crouch, Jr./Harry, mentions of canon background pairings
Content Notes: AU during GoF, violence, gore, torture, unreliable narrators, present tense, underage, corruption, grooming
Wordcount: 4400
Summary: Harry finds out that at least one adult believes that he didn’t put his name in the Goblet of Fire. He thinks of Alastor Moody as a mentor at first, and the only person who knows what’s really going on. The first part doesn’t last long.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. Rohanza asked for a Harry/Barty fic. Warning that this fic is extremely dark, for all that the narrators don’t think so, and while not featuring sexual contact between Harry and Barty, does feature an underage and dysfunctional relationship. Read with caution. This will have at least two parts.
The Heavens Appall
“Why are you crying, then?”
That voice sounds like Professor Moody’s, and so does the scrape of the wooden leg across the stone floor. Harry frantically dries his tears and stands up. He came all the way to the top of the Astronomy Tower to cry. He didn’t think anyone else would be up here.
They’re probably still in the Great Hall, exchanging badges and whispering about him.
“Nothing, sir,” Harry mumbles, and tries to move past Moody. But the man reaches down and puts his hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry has to stop.
Both eyes are fastened on him. He can feel the magical eye. He refuses to look up.
“Well, now,” Moody says softly, “I understand why you are. But there’s better things to do than cry, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” Harry mutters, and shrugs angrily. Moody’s hand just rides his shoulder up and back down again. “But no one but my friend Hermione believes I didn’t put my name in the Goblet, and maybe Professor Dumbledore—and even he was looking at me like—” Harry cuts himself off. He can’t betray that kind of thing in front of a professor he barely knows.
“I believe you, too.”
Harry stares at him. “You do?” Moody said something like that right after his name was announced, Harry thinks, but Harry didn’t pay it a lot of attention. Not as much attention as Ron turning away from him, Hufflepuffs glaring at him, Malfoy with one of those stupid badges—
Harry cuts the thought off.
“Yes,” Moody says. “Let’s say, it seems a lot more likely to me that someone is trying to kill you, like those Death Eater remnants, than a fourteen-year-old getting past Dumbledore’s Age Line.” For a moment, thick disgust coats his voice. Then he continues in a milder tone, “Or you bribing someone older to put your name in.”
Harry nods. He feels a bit better. “Thank you, Professor Moody. I just—”
“Yes?”
“Wish that there’s some way I could show everyone I didn’t cheat. And I can survive. I don’t want to win. Just survive.”
Moody watches him for a long moment, magical eye whizzing around his head to check out the other battlements. Then he says, “Why don’t you come to my office for a bit?”
*
Barty watches Potter settle into a chair in front of his desk, and wonders.
Potter isn’t enjoying his rise to further fame. Barty didn’t necessarily expect him to; no child would like being isolated from his friends. Barty remembers the Ravenclaws who isolated people like that, and the Slytherins.
He smiles inside as he remembers what he did to them in return.
But from what dear Severus said, from what the rumors in the Ministry he visited in Moody’s guise murmured, and from the gossip of the other students, Barty realizes now that he expected someone who would be arrogant about it. Not a child crying in corners.
It intrigues Barty. It reminds him of someone. Several someones.
“Do you want tea?” he asks, and Potter nods. Barty keeps the magical eye fixed on the boy as he prepares the tea. Potter glances around his office once, but otherwise sits in his chair and goes back to staring at his hands.
This won’t do. Barty needs the boy curious and awake to the advantages of his position, willing to seek out solutions at least enough to make sure that he competes well in the Tasks. Yes, Barty can help him and mentor him and urge him along to the right solution, but he can’t act too openly, not in a school with Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore and Igor Karkaroff.
(Ravening hatred sweeps through him at the thought of Albus Dumbledore, his Lord’s enemy, and turns into mind-destroying hatred with the thought of Snape and Karkaroff, the traitors. Barty touches it, strokes it, and dismisses it back to its lair to wait until it’s needed).
That means that Barty will have to take a more active role behind the scenes, and remind the boy of some home truths.
“Why do you let them get to you like that?” he asks, hearing the question in Moody’s gruff tone and judging it good as he hands the boy his teacup. “They’re wrong, and you know they’re wrong. Why not disregard them and just do what you have to do to survive?”
“Because it would be one thing if it was just the Slytherins doing it or something, Professor,” the boy mutters, staring into his teacup and not drinking. He’s also far too thin, Barty thinks, the magical eye allowing him to see hollows of skin and bone that he couldn’t if he were wearing purely human eyes. “I’m used to them getting upset about me. But it’s my friends. And people who didn’t like me much, but—it’s been a few years since they were so hostile. The Hufflepuffs, I mean.”
“What were the Hufflepuffs hostile about, lad?” Barty lifts his own teacup, full of tea doctored with Polyjuice Potion, and takes a long pull.
Potter glances up at him in what looks like disbelief, then blushes and looks away again. “Right. You weren’t here then. Sorry, sir.”
“No need for apologies,” Barty says, and smiles the right width, not letting it crater the way it wants to. “Just tell me.”
“They thought I was the Heir of Slytherin,” Potter sighs, and kicks his ankles. If he notices Barty’s choke or stillness—which he doesn’t, because the first one is inside and the second one he’s looking away from—he gives no sign of it. “There were messages in blood being written on the walls about the Heir of Slytherin and people being Petrified, and they thought I was one because I’m a Parselmouth.”
This time, Barty starts, the tea in his cup audibly sloshing. Potter looks up at him, eyes like little twin suns of ice. “What?” Barty asks hoarsely.
Potter’s mouth pinches. “Are you going to be weird about it, too?” he mutters, and then seems to decide that that isn’t appropriate for a good little boy to say. He looks off to the side. “Sorry, sir.”
“No, tell me more about this,” Barty says, perhaps more insistently than he should. But he has to say it. He reaches out a hand towards Potter, pulls it back (not the right hand, not the hand that should be reaching). “I don’t care that you’re a Parselmouth. I just want to know.”
Potter studies him, then shrugs. “I didn’t even know I was a Parselmouth until Malfoy set a snake on me and it tried to attack another student. I commanded the snake to stop, but everyone thought I was egging it on. I don’t know, it just sounds like English to me. And then the Hufflepuffs whispered about how evil I was, ‘cause the student the snake tried to attack was a Hufflepuff, and then he got Petrified.”
“And the end of it?” Barty whispers (is there an end? Is there a rising end?)
Potter shrugs. “One of my best friends got Petrified. Hermione Granger. She had figured out the monster was a basilisk, though. And we knew where the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets probably was. Ron and I. We went down there when the message said that a student was taken. But there was a rockfall because, uh, well, the professor we tried to take with us wasn’t very cooperative. And I was left alone. I went through and found the Chamber of Secrets and killed the basilisk.”
“How?”
“With the Sword of Gryffindor. And I killed the diary that was possessing, um, a student, and opening the Chamber of Secrets, too.”
Barty notes the omission, but his mind is far away, flying on wings of wonder. A basilisk. There was a basilisk in the school. Potter killed it. Potter is a Parselmouth. He survived.
“How would you like,” Barty says slowly, “to learn some real magic that might let you survive this Tournament?”
*
Harry carefully slides Wonders of the Darker Arts into the bottom of his bag, and walks to the Gryffindor table.
People are still sneering at him, and wearing badges, but it bothers him less than it used to. Harry had to realize that Professor Moody is right. People are going to sneer at him no matter what, Professor Moody says, because they don’t have Harry’s fame or his power. It’s not like Harry can share those things, either, just like his classmates can’t help being stupid or weak. So he just has to ignore it.
Harry did try to argue when Professor Moody talked about power yesterday. “I know I’m famous. But I’m not powerful.”
“Why not, lad?”
“I mean…” Harry feels a little lost. No one’s ever asked him that before. “Because powerful people can make other people do what they want,” he finally settles on. “I can’t even make people here stop laughing at me, or believe that I didn’t cheat. That means that I’m weak no matter how much fame I have. Other people use that fame, not me.”
Professor Moody chuckled darkly and leaned forwards to sip from his flask the way he always did. “Now, Potter, there’s other ways to think of power, you know. What about magical power?”
“It took me months to master the Patronus Charm last year—”
“And most other people couldn’t have done it at all, at your age.” Professor Moody’s eyes gleamed, both of them focused on Harry. Harry used to be kind of unnerved by that, but it’s become a comfort. “Think about that, not how long it took you. And you killed a basilisk!”
“With help.”
“You’re a Parselmouth, lad! That’s a power all its own.”
Harry shuffled his feet on the carpet when Professor Moody said that, and looked at him. “You don’t think it’s—I don’t know, something that only Dark wizards have? Something it wouldn’t be a better idea not to have?”
Professor Moody laughed until his eyes crinkled, although he didn’t actually start crying the way Harry thought he would for a minute. “It’s something they’re afraid of,” he said when he stopped laughing, circling a hand so Harry knew he was talking about the school. “Just like they’re afraid that you put your name in the Goblet and they’re afraid of Dementors because they can’t do anything about them. But do you have to suffer the same fear? Why should you, when you can talk to the snake in its den?”
“Well, I thought you would disapprove…”
“Because, Potter? Why?”
“Because you’re a famous Dark wizard catcher. Anything that makes it seem like someone could be Dark—”
“You listen here.” Moody leaned forwards then, his magical eye rotating around his entire face. “What matters is that you get to survive and hunt down Dark wizards. It doesn’t matter so much how you do it, except you have to learn effective and useful spells. Did you know that the Aurors got permission to use the Unforgivables during the war with—You-Know-Who?”
“They did?” Harry stared at Moody. It seemed outrageous to him that people on the good side would be using those spells to control other people’s minds and torture them and kill them, even if the ones they were doing it to were Death Eaters.
“They did.” Moody nodded firmly, and both his eyes came back and focused on Harry again. “Look up any history of the war, lad, you’ll see. And if Aurors could do that—if I could do that, and still remain a good person—” he chuckled “—then why would you be worried about it? You were a monster-killer at twelve years old! You defeated dozens of Dementors out of pure love!”
Harry flushed. Then he reached out and took the book Moody offered him.
“This’ll tell you about the real magic,” Moody said, and winked at him with the magical eye, which made Harry jump a little. “What matters is your destination, not the road you take to get there, Potter? But a word of advice…”
“Yeah?” Harry was already stroking the book’s cover, feeling as if it was shifting softly beneath his touch, longing to open it and look at the contents.
“Let’s keep it between us, for now,” Moody said, and propped a seamed finger up in front of his lips. “I got permission from Professor Dumbledore to teach you the Unforgivables, but not everyone even approves of that. You ought to have seen some of the Howlers I got.” He chuckled. “And in the meantime, there are people who would think that it’s not fair for me to be giving you that.” He nodded at the book. “As if the person who put you in the Tournament cares about fairness, with your being three years young and all.”
Harry smiled. He liked the idea of secrets. No one believed him about the Goblet. Well, fine, then, he just wouldn’t tell them the truth about this, either. “Don’t worry, Professor. I’ll keep it secret.”
Now, as Hermione slides into the seat beside him and begins some determined chatter that Harry knows is meant to hide the fact Ron isn’t coming, all Harry can think is that she probably wishes she knew magic like this. Harry’s already begun practicing it, and he can cast it. He can make bricks blacken and shatter, and the floor curl up and weep blood. He’ll be prepared no matter what the First Task has.
Maybe he is powerful, after all.
*
Barty sits behind Moody’s skin in the stands watching the dragons, and sits behind his own skin watching Potter as he walks onto the grass, ready to face them.
Face the Hungarian Horntail, its spikes glowing like the end of the beginning, its mouth open and its teeth like frozen Cutting Curses.
(Barty had a job to make sure Potter knew about the dragons, but he managed it. And now Potter walks forwards).
Potter lifts his wand. People lean in around Barty, and he smiles the smile that doesn’t reach the lips or the eyes or the skin, and takes another sip of Polyjuice from his flask.
“Gelo oculos!”
Barty opens his mouth in what the witless will take for a gasp soundless. Yes, that is a good spell, he thinks, as he watches the curse fly and lodge in the dragon’s eyes, freezing them and then popping them with crisp sounds. The dragon screams, the scream soothing something flayed in the depths of Barty’s soul, and rears, clawing at her nose. Potter darts in and grabs the golden egg, freezing some of the dragon’s scales when her hind paw comes down too near him.
The Freezing Eye Curse is also a curse, and there will be people who recognize it and hate it and scold Potter for it. And of course, scolded, he will withdraw further from others, and closer to the only adult who has pretended to care for him.
Barty smiles like a tiger choking.
(There will be a reckoning. There will be so much of a reckoning. Barty dreams of breaking the necks of the people seated in front of him, of drowning them in fire fiercer than any dragon’s).
*
“Harry, how could you? That poor dragon was just trying—”
“To eat me, yeah,” Harry snaps, cradling the fractured wrist that he got grabbing the egg and sprinting away from the dragon and falling on a sharp stone that he didn’t even notice buried in the grass.
Ron and Hermione are in the tent with him, and both of them are staring at him with wide eyes and reddened faces. Harry glares at Ron. He doesn’t even know why Ron is here. Why? What, he couldn’t get his scolding and sneering done from far away anymore, so it had to be up close?
“You could have used something else to stop her!” Hermione looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “Even the Conjunctivitis Curse would be better than that! Or Transfiguration like Cedric did—”
“Transfiguration like I haven’t learned yet?” Harry leans back against the pillow behind him and tries to resist the temptation to close his eyes. Professor Moody mentioned how much the Dark curses take out of you in battle situations, when you can’t just fall back a step and recover but have to run and dodge. But that’s one reason that Harry has to practice them some more, not just give up on them. Voldemort isn’t going to stand around politely and wait for him to recover like a neighbor who didn’t live on Privet Drive.
“You could have used something else!” Ron is waving his arms. “Mate, you should have known—”
“I don’t need to be lectured by someone who thought I was cheating all along,” Harry snaps.
Ron’s face turns red. “Yes, you do! If you’re going to fling Dark Arts around like it’s Knuts you’re dropping on the ground—oh, that’s right, I forgot, you can probably afford Galleons, can’t you, Mr. Wealthy—”
“I was never wealthy because I wanted to be! I was wealthy because my parents were bloody murdered!”
“You don’t have to flaunt it, either! Just like you don’t need to cast that kind of magic—”
“I’ve barely bought anything in the past few years when I could have because you would have been jealous—”
“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Wealthy, I didn’t know having me around was restricting you so much. Shall I go away so that you can just eat your next meal off golden plates? What about si—”
“Stop it!” Hermione shouts.
Harry turns around and glares at her. “And you. You couldn’t even worry about the fact that I could have been burned alive or I’m injured, could you? No, you just have to start scolding and lecturing me right away. Tell me, Hermione, would it have satisfied you if I’d burned to death? At least I would have died doing the right thing, huh?”
Hermione backs up a step, her face going pale. Guilt stabs Harry under the breastbone, but he remembers what Professor Moody told him.
She’s chosen her side, lad. Not her fault. What kind of life has she had? Innocent, entirely innocent. From what you told me, the worst thing that’s ever happened to her is being Petrified for a little while. You went and fought a basilisk in the same period of time. Would she have told you not to kill it? Probably. She would have told you to do lots of things. And they make sense, in her view of the world.
But her view of the world is limited.
So Harry keeps silent, and Hermione turns and runs out of the tent.
“That was bloody cold,” Ron says, sounding shocked. “How could you say that, Harry? You know that she just starts to lecture when she’s worried about people.”
Harry glares at Ron again. At least here he doesn’t have to worry about accidentally hurting someone who was supporting him. Ron hasn’t been supporting him for weeks, and he hasn’t said anything supportive now. Not even that he’s glad Harry didn’t bloody die.
What does it matter what magic Harry cast, if he survived? When he’s in a Tournament with a bunch of people three years older than he is who know all kinds of Dark magic and brilliant spells?
But then, Ron never believed Harry didn’t want to be here. He thinks Harry entered his name on bloody purpose.
“Yeah,” Harry says coldly, “and I know what you do when you’re worried about people, which is stay close and say you’ll be there until the end. But you haven’t done it this time. So you’re not worried about me, are you? Just Hermione and what I might achieve without you.”
Ron opens his mouth, shuts it again, and flushes violently. Then he leaves the tent without a word.
Harry leans back and closes his eyes. He doesn’t like the pain hammering under his breastbone. But isn’t it just a larger echo of the pain that’s been there since Ron disbelieved him about the Goblet? How can he keep either of his friends with him when he’s going to be entering more dangerous territory than either of them have ever walked?
(Really, in the end, this is about keeping them safe as much as himself. They might be horrified by Harry’s use of Dark magic, but they’ll be kept at a distance, and they can’t stop it any more than they can be tainted by it, at that distance).
*
Barty lifts his hip flask in a toast to the boy, as Potter steps through the door of his office. Potter checks and looks at him with a hectic flush on his cheeks. Barty laughs, as quiet as giraffes, and motions Potter further in.
(Further down and further in, leaping along, running and sprawling).
“So tell me,” he says, and pours tea with a dash of Firewhisky for Potter, seeing the way that it makes his flush turn into something like a fire, “what have your friends’ reactions been to your heroic endeavor in the First Task?”
As Barty suspected, Potter turns a dull, ugly red now. Barty frowns. Of course this is the way it should be and is and always would have been, but he does regret that Potter looks as if he’s been torn by the talons of the dragon he avoided when discussing his friends.
Barty…regrets the necessity, he thinks as he listens to Potter. Yes, those are the words he will not speak.
“And Hermione won’t talk to me and tried to report me to Professor McGonagall for evil Dark magic,” Potter finishes, dropping back against his chair and swallowing some of his tea. He doesn’t flinch from the Firewhisky at all, which Barty is grudgingly impressed by. “But Professor McGonagall told her that that curse is on the borders of illegal, not actually Dark—”
Barty conceals a smile. He suspects it’s more lion-clawed Minerva’s reluctance to punish her favorite student. “On the borders of illegal,” in this case, means on the wrong side.
“And now she just avoids me and stays with Ron all the time. Ron yells at me in the common room sometimes. The other Gryffindors act like they don’t know if they should applaud me or what.” Potter sneers. It’s a good sneer. Barty should know. “They still think I cheated.”
“Of course they do,” Barty says gently, in what he can when Moody’s voice is so poisonous to gentleness. “Lad, they’ll think now that you do know the kind of powerful Dark magic that could trick the Goblet.”
Potter’s lips form a silent expletive. Barty barks in laughter. “No need to hold in the swearing around me, boy. Do what you like.”
“Could you…”
Potter trails off. Curious, Barty leans forwards, and curses to himself as Moody’s leg scrapes across the floor like a dream of freedom. “Yes? What? Speak up, now.”
Potter looks up at him with large, wavering green eyes, not at all like the young wizard who cast a curse that deprived a dragon of her own sight. “Could you please not call me boy? My uncle does that. My Muggle uncle.”
Barty tilts his head. Such a prize of interest. “And you don’t like it.”
“I hate him.”
(That isn’t the question Barty asked-implied, but who is he to turn away the grace of such a delicious answer?)
“Then I shall not,” Barty says quietly. “I can keep calling you lad, or Mr. Potter. If you have a preference between those, you can choose.” He has to offer choices, too, to lead Potter down the path that will end in the night.
“Could you—call me Harry?”
Barty blinks the magical eye and gives himself a brief burst of shock like a firework. “You’d like me to do that?”
“Yeah.” Potter worries his bottom lip and then drinks more tea and Firewhisky. “I mean—I know you couldn’t do it in class, in front of the other students. But I’d like you to do it when you’re alone. Please? So that it feels—like I’m the one you want to talk to, not Potter the cheater or someone else you might have tutored.”
Barty resists the urge to cackle. This is excellent, so excellent. He toasts Potter again with his own teacup. “I am more than agreeable, Harry,” he says, and then grins, his own grin for all that it’s Moody’s mouth. Potter, smiling back, doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe assumes that that’s the way Barty’s smile was always supposed to look.
“You are indeed special among the ones I’ve tutored,” Barty goes on, and that’s true no matter which guise he carries. Potter is more interesting and important than the Ravenclaw and Slytherin students who came to Barty in his schooldays or the young Death Eaters he tried to show Dark magic to. And Moody can’t have trained as many Auror apprentices who were so quick to pick up Dark magic. “And now, a word of advice.”
“Yes, sir?” Potter’s sitting up in his seat, practically vibrating.
“None of that, now, bo—” Barty pauses deliberately. “Harry,” he acknowledges. “I do insist that you call me Alastor.”
“Yes, of course.” Potter’s eyes are as round as stars.
“That word of advice,” Barty begins. It’s as lucky (as opals) that neither Dumbledore nor Snape approached Potter after the First Task. They could have undone his plan. “You should realize that there exists an art called Legilimency, which will draw thoughts and memories out of your mind and render this arrangement of ours much harder to enjoy.”
“People can read my mind?”
“Yes, Harry. And two of those people are your least favorite teacher and your favorite Headmaster.”
Harry’s eyes craze with betrayal, and Barty smiles and drinks from his hip flask.
