no glory in the silken things (glory is in the hurt)
I understand now why children and the dead are abandoned. Heaven is a cult of the irrational. In my glazed-over eyes, your body found an ally;
- urban renewal
Picture it: Barty Crouch is standing in a room and inside his skin his bones have shattered, collapsed in on themselves in a splintered, windblown mess. You think: how easy it is for brittle things to break. How every broken thing inside him is held together only by this outside delusion of wholeness.
So if you touched him, maybe he would shatter.
The boy sinks to his knees. Shudders. Breathes. The empty rattle of his chest fills the room; a horrifying echo.
You know how this story ends: with a man, in a cell, trying to hold a memory together by fraying seams.
You know how every story ends: at the end of time, at the end of all thought. With death.
But death is a degradation of parts. First the heart, and then. The rest. There are things that can take ten years to die.
We are not there yet. We are nowhere close.
They recover the mask. Solid, broken husk of it. The body has been taken along with the wand. Nothing now but a ghost to mourn, nothing solid left of his lover- they will bury him in an empty grave, bury him with empty hearts too hollow to grieve.
Perhaps it is better this way.
The man (or a boy, perhaps he is still a boy, perhaps we can still call him a boy)- the boy sits on a chaise lounge, runs his fingers across the gilt inlay, the eye-holes in the mask. The lingering warmth in the metal that’s from no hand other than his own. What’s yours is mine.
(And now what’s mine is only mine.)
Slowly, achingly gently, the metal warps with the trail of Barty’s palm. Shudders and begins to break, ruination from the inside travelling out. In the end it becomes nothing more than a ball of metal, twisted out of shape, out of recognition.
He drops it on the floor and incinerates it with a curl of his hand. And then he breathes, a shudder of breath- the first breath he takes since that night that does not feel breathed underwater. As though he has at last broken the surface, a giddying relief that travels from his lungs to his limbs to the tips of his shaking fingers.
No, he has no use for dead things.
This is how you burn love: in a fireplace, stoking the flames with pages of softly lettered poetry, letters and words and memory. A book of sonnets. A bundle of photographs taken when they were still in school. The creased edges of a letter, a half visible sentence before the thing catches a spark, bursts into flame; ‘and in dreams I follow...’.
The ashes of his love he leaves in the hearth.
By the time he finishes the house is a hollow hull, a body scoured of the heart. Empty even with a breathing thing inside. Everything that belonged to them gone, all but the contents of a room he doesn’t return to.
He will never return to that room.
(In ten years the room will still be there. A man will open the door, breathe in the musty carpet and caked dust. He will stand there awhile, before he leaves as quietly as he came.
He will leave flowers on the floor, a bundle of blue azaleas and pale lilies.)
“I thought I’d find you here.”
He startles, though his gaze does not turn to look behind him. But the patterns his thoughts trace in the sky fade with every second that passes, strange constellations that become mere stars once more. He unfolds his legs from underneath him and stands up on the parapet.
There is a moment where he feels like he could fall. Fly. Something tangibly fragile about this human flesh that cloaks him. The wind could sway him at any moment, off the parapets and off the Astronomy tower.
He could split open like a seam and he wonders what truth would slip out, would free itself of his skin once it came off.
He hums instead, drops down to the ground with a smile.
“You always do find me. Did Isabelle give me away again?”
His mouth tips into a smile (artless, thoughtless, radiant), his hand slipping through Evan’s. And he’s anchored to ground not by stone but by warmth; by the slender, solid fingers of Evan’s hand that are a spell of homecoming woven into his bones.
His own fingers tighten, gently squeezing Evan’s palm. It’s not some flash of realization. Not the crash of waves against a cliff, not the cliff-face giving. Not even the slow wear of water on rock. Just a fleeting thought. As gentle and soft as the breeze that catches his sleeve; I love this boy, the breeze whispers, I love him.
Barty smiles. “Let’s go.”
You could say they were fated.
I think they were fated.
And Barty Crouch will think: if you can call this fate, then losing you is made even crueler.
He will think: I will burn the world for this. For you.
He lets go. Unsteadies himself, unhooks his body from his heart. Redefines intimacy as blood, as the slow bleed of a corpse at his feet.
Can you feel this? Can you feel me?
He stops thinking, stops remembering. Redefines himself by his own misshapen shadow.
Everything that was soft in him is broken now, perhaps was always broken- and there is clarity with this, clarity in his understanding. Softness did not keep that person by his side. Softness will not bring him back.
There is a phantom fever in his limbs. Keeping him awake at night, turning him numb.
He sleeps only when he can’t stay awake any longer, anchors every breath to the cool wood of the floor. The ash of the fireplace drifting with the breeze through a window. He imagines that his bones, too, have turned to ash. Immolated by his own touch.
Maybe this is the truth that had been buried all along, lost between the easy friendship of childhood and the false warmth of love: this is the truth he finally realizes. He has always wanted to watch the world burn.
And god, we can pretend they ran, we can pretend neither of them died and they woke up in a house in Normandy and never went back, that nothing else bad ever happened. We can pretend there was just love and love was enough. To keep them safe. To keep them alive. Together until the end.
Instead there is just this: the feeling of being posed, poised on the edge of something awful. There is the feeling of falling. No ground in sight. Just a promise of gravity, the premonition of blood splatter.
It’s mapping the track of his bones, this fate. Become a runaway train, hurtling towards an end.
If you saw them now: a dead boy, and a boy who is reaching but not quite able to touch him.
(tell me their names. tell me who is who.)
And see: this is the trouble with making homes out of other people.
Now you’ve left everything you own in a place that no longer exists.
Now you’re in a telephone box at 3 in the morning, calling a dead number while the rain keeps falling all around you. Enclosed in the four walls of a place you can pretend is a shelter. And nowhere in the world is a place you can call home.
Nowhere in the world does home exist any more.
There is a boy in a room that smells perpetually of ash, waiting for the morning to come, waiting for daylight to throw light on his pallid skin and absolve him of his sins. And he might as well be standing in the rain. He might as well be soaked through to the bone. Drowning in his own rotten mess.
There is no happy ending, this story is only an epitaph.
There’s blood between his teeth and Barty finds it traps the words on his tongue, turns them wet and vicious in the silken ease that they slip from his mouth. Once, he had loved more than just the shadow of a dead boy.
Now the insignificance galls him. The insignificance of them. Of him. Of this world. None of them matter: every name he won’t say, every name he’s forgotten. Micah. Amos. Isabelle. Sometimes he sheds them from his thoughts as a snake sheds its skin. Every old memory burned, how easy it is to forget. Until he’s a wild, untamed thing, blood between his teeth as he breathes his worship: ‘my Lord’. He becomes a creature wrought of wrath and fire and nothing human can touch him.
But all creatures are irresolute.
He unsteadies himself from his heart and there is a hurt in his chest even when he does not think of it. He is burning, all aflame, and inside the hollow hull of his body the water rises.
Barty dreams of a black abyss. Of the world rushing up to meet him. Of a mountain of corpses beneath his feet.
They are none of them nightmares.
“Please.” The girl is begging now, threats forgotten, only terror left behind. He spins their wand between his fingers. His own is on the ground, thrown earlier to the corner of the room with a well-aimed Expelliarmius. For a fleeting instant, he considers making it quick.
“Please.” They have a mother, they plead, they have a sister, there is a lonely plant on a vase in a room waiting for its owner to come back and water it.
Perhaps it’s mercy they’re begging for. He considers that, the thought oddly detached. But impatience is threading under his skin, a drifting hunger for blood, a desire for something he can no longer place name to. He watches them beg, considers the screaming that hasn’t abated upstairs. There is no information he needs from this girl.
He drops the wand.
Draws out a knife.
Blood washes away his sins. He rocks back on his heels, watches a string of red run sticky between his fingers.
“Circe.” Someone says, the door swinging open and heavy footsteps stopping at the edge of the room. Barty breathes, tilts his head up to the absolution of blood splattered walls and the windowless dark.
“You’re fucking insane, Crouch.”
Barty offers the other a bloodless smile, invisible behind the mask. “Just relieving stress.” He says.
The other Death Eater snorts in disgust. “I’ll be outside. And use a Scourgify, for Merlin’s sake.”
The boy stands, and by chance catches a glimpse of his bloodied reflection in a window pane. The gore dripping off his robes. He laughs.
See, do you see. Blood is the truest thing with which to reach the dead. Seances are performed with blood after all. Blood as the sacrifice, blood as the catalyst. Blood as a message, blood as the method of delivery.
And though he does not know it, Barty Crouch is writing one last love letter.
He will write it with the blood of a hundred dead men.
Here is the thing: if you close your hands about your throat and choke the light from your eyes every night, just to watch it wake up in your body in the morning. It will hurt. It will keep on hurting.
You might think something dies, you might think a week is a long time, and a week and two days already makes nine lives. You might think if you keep killing yourself one morning you won’t wake up. But you are the ghost haunting your own body, you are the ghost who won’t stay dead.
Insanity: doing the same thing a hundred times and expecting something to change.
You kill yourself and it hurts. It will keep on hurting.
The dark says his name in a thousand different voices. There’s a name on Barty’s lips as well, a confession waiting to be said, waiting for the dark to claim. He will not say it. Will never say it until everything is over, until the whole world has been set aflame.
Instead he stands in the cold of evening, the wind cruel around him. Lingering only to bite at the skin.
There is a whisper in a voice he cannot name. A memory or a delusion or both. Be gentle with yourself, my love.
Such lovely words. Such a lovely lie.
He watches the water, watches his distorted reflection in a black puddle. His lungs are full with water and his dreams are of a wildfire, crashing over the earth. Of a cleansing through flame.
Oh my love, my love.
He inhales. Every exhale empties him a little, a little more. He unmakes himself with every passing breath.
They’re in Evan’s room. A vase of flowers on the windowsill. There are camellias blooming outside, a field of green he remembers from some distant memory. He is content. He cannot remember the last time he was so content.
He looks back, looks over to Evan, standing by the door.
“I love you.” There is an ease to the words that makes something tighten in his chest.
His fingers stretch out. He doesn’t reach.
His eyes are wet. His breath shudders out of his body, opens into the dark; a wreckage, a derelict ruin.
Sometimes, he’s just so tired.
He watches a man writhe on the floor and almost closes his eyes, almost gets lost in the inbetween, half in a dream as he sways on his feet.
“Shut up.” He says. All the anger has bled out. “Shut up.”
Afterwards, when the blood has drained away and there is quiet again, he falls to his knees. The weight of air too heavy to be withstood. The weight of his heart like a stone, wanting to return to the earth.
You’ve ruined me, my love.
It’s too late, and it’s too late, and it’s too late for this and yet.
We can pretend. Just for a moment.
If you close your eyes and if you open them again, maybe Barty Crouch wakes up with a warm body next to him. And maybe the alarm clock is ringing, the sun is rising in the east and it paints the walls pink, leaves a glow on every untouched surface, on the soft lines of Evan’s face.
Maybe in this world, love is enough.
So maybe they’re in a village off the coast of France, they try to cook for each other and one of them buys a muggle cookbook from the corner-shop. And they learn how to make apple pie and bouillabaisse and tarte tatin, and they make a mess of the kitchen for months before they get the hang of muggle cooking, before they label the seasoning jars and stop putting sugar in the vegetable stew. And there’s something soothing about it, about washing dishes and waiting for things to cook and forgetting to use spells to make the bed and clean the house.
And they still burn the stove sometimes, but usually in July, usually when the July poltergeist shows up and doesn’t let them make anything with raspberries in it for a month.
There’s a family-run corner-shop on their street and the woman at the till gives them Tupperware boxes of soup and pastries whenever they visit because her own children are grown up and in the city now, and she always cooks too much and has too many leftovers.
And every so often, every few months, foreign visitors will show up- a man with dark hair and dark eyes and a scowl on his face, a woman with a laugh that entrances anyone in hearing distance- they’ll stay for a few weeks, before leaving again, with a wave and a promise to return. There’ll be letters every week, carried not by the postman but by owls who leave feathers all over the place.
And maybe fifteen, twenty years from now they wake in a bed together and Barty brushes the hair from Evan’s eyes, gets up to water the hibiscus plants on the sill. Maybe he gets pulled back down for a kiss that half misses his mouth, and laughs. And maybe everything is right with the world.
Open your eyes, love. It’s time for the war again.
The time for dreaming is over.
The sky’s been dark since the morning, been dark since the day the world sank from the sun and never resurfaced. Lost in the quiet of space.
He can’t stand it, this quiet. Gentler than mourning should ever be. But his throat is wet and he’s so tired, he’s already screaming with every shallow breath that leaves his lungs.
Barty closes his eyes, tips his head up into the pouring rain. Around him the empty street echoes with it, water on every surface, dripping off cars, the drains at the end of the cul-de-sac gurgling.
The sky’s turned the same gray as the bottom of the pool. His closed palms run pink in the downpour, turning clear as the rain washes the blood from his skin. There’ll be more bloodshed before the day is out.
He doesn’t remember what day of the week it is. He stopped keeping count awhile ago. The next battle is soon, he knows that. Soon. Rain soaks his hair, trickles down his throat.
He breathes, and for once his lungs accept oxygen without seizing, the exhale does not burn. Perhaps it’s the water, getting under his skin. Perhaps it’s this cool numbness, the closest thing to anticipation that spreads and expands, cloaking him in its dispassionate haze.
Barty, don’t.
A hum of sound, he opens his mouth and waits for the rain to swallow him. “What is it, love?”
Let it go. A voice, on the wind, taking shelter on his shoulder.
(It’s alright, Evan.
Let me go.)
He takes a step, vanishes from the street. It takes a second, perhaps two for the rain to cover the dry damp left behind, beneath the echo of his footsteps. He is gone as though he was never there.
How mutely the world watches him go.
He visits his mother. Or something like it. He wears the face of a nondescript man, reading a muggle newspaper, waits for her to appear in the dying light of dusk. His farewell is pressed in a palm to the brick wall, is in the waver of his footsteps as he Apparates away.
The wetness on his face he does not name.
They say that in Apparation, a window is opened, a cut is made in the fabric of the world. And so maybe for a moment, another world reaches out. For a moment, the fragment of an instant, Barty thinks: there are choices still to be made. If I wanted it. If.
But alternate realities do not touch this one. Alternate fates do not exist.
And if they did, they are not his to take.
This is the truth: Barty Crouch has never dreamed of anything happy. Never dreamed up a happy end. Never dreamed of anything except what he could take, of blood in his mouth from the taking of it.
Tragedy was always a choice.
He remembers an Autumn evening. The seaside in shades of red and gold. How the wind had scattered across the beach. Erased their footsteps, stolen their voices. How for a moment they had been ghosts, rendered immaterial with no mark on the world. Wasn’t it a premonition, even then, the premonition of a haunting.
“Are you here?” He asks, and all the wildness has left him. Just a creature now, just an animal, starved. Wanting. Waiting. Waiting for death. “Are you haunting me?”
A lost implore.
He doesn’t know what to do with himself.
The wind gives him no answer.
Oh, this violent myth of us.
Of love.
He is so tired of waiting.
Yours. Everything in me yours, to keep, to take, to have.
The sky is clear, reminiscent of days he had stood on the Astronomy tower, watched the stars through a telescope, swept constellations into a palm with the tips of his fingers.
He rocks back on his heels, watches the stars streak across the sky. A strand of hair falls in his eyes and he thinks he should get it cut soon. Thinks of how awfully mundane such a thought is. This. This world.
There’s a tremor under his skin. A piece of soul trying to find a seam, trying to slip out, pulled by the wind that blows past. He is sitting on grass, but it is a precipice all the same, the edge of this field is the edge of the world.
Soon, he thinks. “I’ll see you soon.”
The war ends. Barty does not die.
Gods, he should be dead.
So here is the end: every memory of light and love turned dark, turned hollow like a shell with its innards scraped out.
It’s an ugly cacophony of noise, of dark on dark. Skeletal hands that take away sight and sanity, bleach the colour from his dreams until he can’t remember the shade of Evan’s eyes, the gentle inflection of his voice. This cold cell that takes every memory and ruins it, turns it against him until every dream is a nightmare.
He screams. He forgets. He forgets. He buries every remaining fragment of his lover, his love, his love away in a box in a chest in a room in the back of his mind. Somewhere he can’t reach. Somewhere it can’t be taken.
They will take it anyway.
Time bleeds together, a sluggish thing that unmoors him from reality, from conscious thought. There is nothing to count here, nothing save repetition, the irregular passing of shadows across his cell.
Can you see him now, this man become a boy become an animal again. This creature curled in on itself, limbs breakable and broken, mind cracked like a stone. Sanity fallen through like sand through a sieve.
Every memory is gone, still the horror in his head does not abate.
The tragedy of it: this story will never be over.
so i keep singing you all these spirituals pray it lifts the curse keeps me chasing ghosts of dreams from funeral to birth in reverse in reverse.
@arosenamedevan
I wrote this for catharsis, though it’s a year late in coming. 3,700 words of... well, I don’t know. Disjointed bits and pieces, I suppose. Though I’ll never write this Barty again, I think there will always be a place in my heart for him.
