@iustusetpeccator // sturgis
Kreacher is highly unpleasant. Most everyone is keen to just ignore his existence. Barty, however, adores the hideous and crotchety thing in all of his grumbly glory. In a sense, he’s a relic of the past, and Barty feels a great sentimentality for him. The feeling is mutual, and the house elf tends to gravitate to him when he’s present, despite their personalities not being the most complementary at times. In fact, they’re incredibly incompatible together, and it’s a testament to their allegiance toward the memory of Regulus.
“Pick a card.” Barty has some playing cards out, and this is certain to not go well. Muggle items aren’t the kind of thing that should be in the house of Black. “Any card. And don’t show me what it is you pull, Kreacher.”
“Why?” Kreacher doesn’t hide his chronically frustrated tone. He does as asked, however. After all, he is a house elf, and Barty is the most deserving of his servitude out of anyone here, in his opinion. He inspects his card.
“WHAT!” How Barty thought he could do this without causing a scene is a mystery, and Kreacher’s squawking has probably caught the attention of anyone within Grimmauld. “Muggles have no magics, no magics is what makes them mudbloods.”
What follows is the playing out of a card trick. I learned it from my friend Adnan during schooling, Barty explains. Him’s the mudblood you fraternized with, Kreacher replies. Please don’t call him that, Barty says. The back and forth and back and forth continues throughout until Barty does the infamous and very cliche (to anyone familiar with muggle culture) line of “Is this your card?”
“No! No, Master Crouch, you pull a NASTY TRICK on Kreacher! This is not magic, Kreacher knew it, mudbloods don’t have magic...”
“It’s magic to them, not us. It’s MUGGLE magic, not real magic.” As Barty’s saying this, Kreacher recoils and gives the kind of groan someone might cry upon hearing a terrible, no-good pun. It seems Barty has a knack for upsetting house elves with his antics because, for the second time in recent history, he has sent one stomping off and grumbling out of incredible distaste for his decorum.
“Lying, deceitful, disrespectful BOY.” If Kreacher and Winky agree on anything, it’s that Barty is terribly childish and not at all well-mannered, in their eyes, for what the Crouch heir should be like. And maybe that sort of thing would have bothered Barty when he was younger, but it’s one of the anxieties that he has managed to squash in adulthood.
“So it was your card, then?”
Cue a shriek from Kreacher, pulling at his ears as he ducks out of the room.