The Coldest Form of Warm - Sirius Black / Barty Crouch Jr.
A multichapter fan fiction about Sirius Black and Barty Crouch. It is canon compliant and fills in all the gaps in their relationship. It starts 1974 and will cover everything up until Sirius' final years - from the good years to very, very, very bad years. The story is already completed and we will update it on a regular basis. We are so happy about everyone who reads it!
(Explicit and with graphic depictions of violence & major character death (don't blame us, blame canon!))
Barty had seen Sirius languishing in a life that was no longer his.
That was why he had started calling for Sirius. Mostly at night and in his dreams and then during the day too. Sometimes he had touched Sirius, put his hand gently on his shoulder. Of course Sirius couldn't feel him, but maybe he could? Their bond had been so irrational and so devoid of reason, they had suffered so much and yet held on to each other. Barty knew that he had betrayed Sirius last and that Sirius would have been willing to go with him. They could have fled, to a faraway place and tried to see if their love could save them both.
And now Sirius was here, he was really here.
Barty was crying without realising it. His hands shook and when Sirius stood up and pushed himself into his arms without hesitation, he shook under his sobs.
When the Dementors had removed his soul from his body, they had removed the part of Barty that was hopeless and disorientated. They had taken away the evil, the madness, the result of his life. What they hadn't been able to take away was the young Barty who loved Sirius with all his heart.
The Barty who loved Sirius so much that he hadn't been able to die.
Not really, strictly speaking.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
we've written some really dark chapters about how barty finally dies in askaban and how sirius lives another eight years in captivity. canon is awful, but why exactly did we want to explore that in more depth?
this story and both characters are so close to our hearts after all these years, they have been with us since 2021 and have been a place of refuge, encouragement, a destination for weird and wild fantasies, have given us hope and good feelings, we have laughed and suffered, have discovered new parallels to sirius and barty, have found new gaps and open endings and filled them with our ideas and thoughts. this story is slowly coming to an end and we know that (almost) exclusively painful chapters lie ahead of us, but these characters have become a home for us.
it feels like a fucking privilege to share the beauty within
A friend asked me if I thought Barty Crouch Jr is the Sirius who was sorted into Slytherin - and I realized Barty is the opposite side of the coin of Sirius.
Barty was sorted into Slytherin at the start of the war - and Voldemort’s supporters had been growing for a decade. So I don’t think Crouch Sr wanted his son anywhere near that house.
The housemates Barty had were literally the people Crouch Sr despised and wanted to throw in prison. They were people that Barty Crouch Sr literally had hunted down as cruelly as possible. By the time Barty graduated, I promise you that at least some of the people he had known personally had been arrested or even killed by his father’s aurors. That has to be chilling for a kid.
We know that Crouch Sr despised the Dark Arts and came down hard on established families like the Lestranges.
I think that Arthur is a decent parallel to Crouch Sr - the Weasleys are also a Sacred 28 family that find blood purity politics despicable. I think that Arthur feels <i>especially</i> strongly about speaking out about families like the Malfoys <i>because</i> Arthur is pure blood and he hates being lumped in with Dark Art practicing bigots.
And that is very much the energy that I see from Crouch Sr. He has a deep need to decry and destroy Dark Arts and I think he felt disgusted by blood purism. While I don’t think Crouch Sr would ever brawl in a bookshop, I think Crouch Sr would <i>love</i> to take Malfoy down and see Lucius rot in jail with the rest of them.
Okay. Back to Sirius. (I do love you, Siri)
The two have so many parallels. This post is a good breakdown of how much of Sirius’s interpretation of Barty’s situation was likely projecting and what it says about his own family.
They both were raised in powerful families, had high expectations put on them, and in whatever way didn’t live up to them. They both had at least one cruel parent. And another parent who, at minimum, didn’t protect them. (It’s generally suspected Orion was also cruel - it is possible he was just absent)
They’re both smart and talented. I wish we could see more of Barty as Barty but what he did as Moody - holy fuck the boy is skilled. That’s after a decade of house arrest and imperius following years in Azkaban.
I doubt he was allowed a wand. I imagine he spent a lot of time just reading and it’s a skill to be able to turn reading into practical application.
Sirius is reportedly quite skilled as well.
They were both rejected by their families.
But on opposite sides.
Barty Crouch Sr is head of magical law enforcement. I think the Blacks are like the Malfoys - they didn’t follow the laws properly. They certainly had loads of dark artefacts. I imagine most of them were illegal. Crouch Sr and the Blacks were on opposite sides.
The Blacks also seemed to have a lot more ancestral politics and expectations. It’s generally assumed heirs and proper heterosexual pureblood were expected. Admittedly I don’t know if this was stated, but it’s a strong assumption. So Sirius was expected to marry for power and to improve the family name - love had no place there.
We don’t know, but I suspect Crouch Sr didn’t subscribe to this. He had no problem throwing his son in Azkaban even though it would mean the end of the Crouch line unless Sr had another son. Which there’s no evidence he tried to do. I think Barty was likely discouraged from dating until after he was well established in his career and warned that dalliances were distractions.
So Sirius would have been raised being groomed to take on a role on an illegal family and taught underhanded methods. Barty would have been raised being groomed to take on a position of political power and uphold the law with cruel, emotionless force.
I think they were both taught to see all interpersonal relationships as means to an end. You don’t befriend people because you like them and get on - you make alliances with people who can help you achieve your goals.
So neither of them were given healthy love and support growing up. Neither were shown how to form healthy emotional attachments even with friends. Both of them were likely trained to focus on relationships with others as a means to an end and had high expectations placed on them that had nothing to do with their individual wants and needs and desires.
And both of them were sorted into a house full of people their family found despicable and actively worked to destroy.
Although Crouch Sr worked a lot more effectively.
Barty is actually, honestly, a far more tragic version of Sirius.
yes! this!! we actually think that they could be so close because they have both experienced the same pain, the same fears. they could be there for each other, understand each other better than most others. especially because of the last point:
So neither of them were given healthy love and support growing up. Neither were shown how to form healthy emotional attachments even with friends. Both of them were likely trained to focus on relationships with others as a means to an end and had high expectations placed on them that had nothing to do with their individual wants and needs and desires.
they were never given healthy love an support growing up - but could very well give it to each other.
Everything about what they could feel together was like a wild rush, it felt as if now, finally and after a year together, the longing was making its way, as if neither of them could hold back anymore.
For the first time in his life Barty had done something that was only good for him, for the first time in his life he admitted to wanting these things just for himself, for the first time he felt intoxicated and happy and everything in between.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Sirius paused for a moment, swallowed (his mouth was dry and his throat even more so) and then continued quietly, as if this conversation was a plaster that he just had to pull off quickly. "About my feelings for you."
mother fuck, while doing research for my james potter essay for @annabtg, I came across THIS quote:
Madam Rosmerta: “Of all the people to go over to the Dark Side, Sirius Black was the last I’d have thought … I mean, I remember him when he was a boy at Hogwarts. If you’d told me what he was going to become, I’d have said you’d had too much mead.”
Sirius Black was, even to someone who barely knew him, SUCH a deeply good person that he was the last person you'd have thought would become a death eater. THE LAST PERSON. Not the loyal, Gryffindor-bred James Potter, not quiet Prefect Remus Lupin, SIRIUS FUCKING BLACK, the firstborn son of a blood supremacist family with several family members who actively served Voldemort.
Young Sirius Black was so full of goodness that if someone said he was going to be a death eater, Rosmerta would have thought they must be drunk.
And Remus and McGonagall and Dumbledore and everyone else who knew him so much better let him go to Azkaban without a trial, never tried to get him out, never gave this boy the benefit of the doubt.
And then what did he do when he broke himself out of Azkaban? He forgave Remus in an instant. He rejoined the Order. He trusted Dumbledore enough to willingly stay locked up again. He handed his house over to be used for the Order, welcomed people to come and go as they pleased, to stay long-term if they needed -- even Snape, who had recently been eager to have him killed. And in a matter of two years, showed Harry more parental love and support than anyone had before -- to the point of dying for him, exactly as his parents did.
So when you actually look at canon Sirius, I think it's very clear why he was the last person you'd expect.
It would always be like this between them, until the end: Barty always saw Sirius because Sirius let him look - but the other way round, Sirius would always miss far too many things, signs, clues, until it was too late.
The next time a normal harry Potter fan asks me who my favorite character is, I'm gonna say Barty Crouch Jr and smile as the confusion and horror fill their face.
"You've always been there," Barty said quietly, but he wanted to express that urgently. "So yeah, it was fate and we shouldn't have met, but we did, and still, you've always been there," he whispered, snuggling closer to his friend. "I knew who you were from my first day at school. I saw you and I saw you in Regulus," Barty said seriously. "You were always there in the castle and I could look past you for a while, but then eventually I couldn't. You were always there," he whispered and was so moved again. It was almost embarrassing. "You were in the wood of the table," Barty whispered, stroking the lines in Sirius' palms. "You were in the fire, where the flame glows red," he added, stretching up a little to kiss Sirius' lips. "You were in the sky, every night," he confessed further, slowly realising how much he had wanted Sirius to see him back then. "You were under my skin when you were laughing and even when you weren't… when you weren't laughing," he whispered, as if he had to tell Sirius all these thoughts before their time together was up. Barty had noticed at school when the Black brothers had come back from their holidays with their lips twisted in pain. "You already showed me everything back then. And even more clearly today, today you're still under my skin," Barty said chokingly, and he already knew that tiredness and fear were responsible for this, but he had to say these things, they burned in his chest and would continue to burn there.
okay but adhd sirius?? it’s right there!! he’s impulsive as fuck (going after peter, the Prank) and clearly does not think before he does things. It ends up inevitably hurting others or even himself, in the case of his little vacation to azkaban. He also seems to be rather restless or quick to get bored from what I remember reading? There’s more and it’ll come to me-
His world ended where the light began. It ended right between him and Sirius. For a moment Barty was silent, listening to Sirius breathe and cry, listening to his own tears, listening to the sharp pain in his chest. And then Barty tentatively slipped two fingers through the crack of the door, pushed them towards Sirius: as an offer. "I'm so sorry, Sirius," he whispered. "But that's the truth. You can let them look inside my head, you can check it out if you want. You can kick me out and I'll leave. You can hate me for it. But I've given you everything. That's the truth."
