Barty Crouch, Jr. is not Oedipus Rex. (culling) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2008-09-19 12:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1979-09] september, barty crouch jr, jacqueline macnair (née wilkes), julianne wilkes |
Who: Barty and Jacqueline, with a cameo from Julianne
Where: The Wilkes family home, St James, Westminster.
When: Friday afternoon, 19th September 1979.
What: Barty's getting Self-Esteem Lessons. :[
Rating: PG/PG-13ish, probably.
Status: Logged!
Barty was not looking forward to this in the slightest. He wished that he could have been happier -- after all, there had been several good things about this past week: Antonin had woken from his coma on Wednesday night, he (Barty) had successfully displayed backbone to both Father and Severus, and Anzhelina had appeared to be tolerating his attempts to display concern for her, even if she was only tolerating it -- but he had spent the entire work day counting down the hours until his shift was over. Finally, at half-past two, he was done for the day and thought that, surely, his doom was nigh. Well... he could hardly say that he was perfectly contented with his life or how it had gone, as he was not contented in the slightest -- and, in all honesty, if he were meant to die, he rather wished that it would have been in the field of battle -- but he hoped, as he knocked on the front door of the Wilkes home, that Jacqueline would be gentle in murdering him.
Jacqueline had spent every moment that she had thought of Barty since she had told him she knew about his feelings pinching the bridge of her nose tightly, barely able to keep her frustration in check. She loved Barty dearly, really as a member of her family, but it was easy to see where Anzhelina was coming from on this matter. He was so tightly wound, he couldn't handle anything gracefully. Even she wanted to punch him over it. Who cared that Anzhelina knew that Barty had feelings for her? Shouldn't that be a good thing? Logically, because she, Jacqueline, had spoken to Anzhelina about it and was now offering Barty advice on the matter, shouldn't it be assumed she had valuable insight to pass on? It never failed to distress Jacq how often people completely abandoned logic in favor of insanity. It was truly disheartening.
Her elf answered the door and led him into the parlour where Jacqueline was taking an early tea, which she had intended to soothe him. Smiling, she stood and held out her hand to receive him. "Barty, I hope you're hungry."
Half-reflexively, Barty clasped Jacqueline's hand in return and gave her a small, awkward, and forcedly hopeful smile in return, despite not feeling even remotely cheerful at the moment. He didn't really feel hungry either -- as Olga had brought him lunch not too long ago and he had eaten it -- but his attempts at gaining body mass went slowly, at best: it had been nearly a month (four weeks and two days) now since Antonin had taken Barty to the Old Parsonage and insisted that he begin taking better care of himself or else, and while Barty thought that he had been eating well enough, he had only barely gained five pounds and, at that, his constant worrying and fretting over something or other was always threatening to erase that progress. None of that really mattered, though: Jacqueline wanted him to be hungry, and Antonin wanted him to gain weight, and so Barty would eat even though he had no desire to do so.
"Famished, Jacqueline," he lied quite easily, waiting for her to sit so that he could follow suit.
She took her seat and gestured to the empty chair across from her, her eyes watching every movement on his face. He was clearly just as tightly-wound as he always was, and as it always made her feel, Jacqueline wanted nothing more in that moment than to hex his father so strongly he would never stop feeling it. What he had done to this boy was atrocious and she hated that it was left to his friends to deal with the fallout. No one should think so little of themselves, least of all someone as amazing as Barty. "Please sit."
Short, terse instructions usually meant one of a few things, in Barty's experience, and all of them were bad. Given the tone that Jacqueline had had with him over the journals on Tuesday, he was quite certain that the apt translation of her present mood would have been something akin to, 'Sit now or I will be incredibly displeased and possibly murder you.' Nodding, Barty took the seat opposite Jacqueline and respectfully folded his hands in front of him. "How are you faring today, Jacqueline?" he asked, the unnecessary repetition of her name slinking insidiously into his speech.
"I'm well, Bartemius, how are you?" She mocked his overly-formal tones, hoping to set him at ease. "Take a deep breath, Barty. Relax. I am not here to beat you into submission."
Barty wrinkled his nose in mild confusion with Jacqueline's decision to mock him (and with her use of his full first name, which he had as much difficulty with as the fact that he was not allowed to have an original name). ...He was just being proper. There was nothing wrong with that. Sighing, he forced himself to at least attempt to look as though he were trying to relax. "Fine. Then what is your intention, exactly, beyond what you already said?"
"To make you a suitable candidate for the wooing of Miss Anzhelina Dolohov."
Oh, god -- Barty was going to die. He was going to faint and die. ...Well, hopefully he would not faint beforehand; Jacqueline had already gotten upset with him for panicking, and that had just been over journals.
She rolled her eyes. "Stop looking at me like that. If you really want Anzhelina as your wife, you have to be willing to fight for her."
"What, pray tell, is the point?" Barty snapped, forcefully massaging the bridge of his nose. Merlin's beard, this was unfair. The consequences of one night of excessive drunkenness -- his first and possibly only night of excessive drunkenness, at this rate -- should not have been allowed to extend so far. Nor should all of Barty's friends have been allowed to go insane at the same time; it was incredibly inconvenient. "I know that she only tolerates me because her father likes me, I rather doubt that this is going to change, and, besides that, she deserves the best, not..."
Barty had been painfully close to finishing the sentence with, 'someone like me,' but cut himself off when he finally heard his tone. Looking away from Jacqueline and down at his hands, he got out a fast, but genuine apology: "I'm sorry; I should not have snapped at you when you did nothing to deserve it."
She clenched her fist on the tabletop, keeping an iron control on her temper, which Barty was uniquely exasperating right now. "She does deserve the best, and you're the best, as long as you take the time to slow down and realize it, you dunce." She tossed her head indignantly. "The point is for you to be happy, you great git."
"To what purpose, Jacqueline?" he snapped again. He knew full and well that he needed to stop that, but, really, as much as he wanted to be happy for various things, he had not had the best of weeks, and sleeping and eating properly were hardly doing any of the help that they supposedly did. "Every time I have been even remotely happy recently, something awful has happened. On one occasion, my father decided that my mother's pregnancy was not worth a face-to-face discussion. No, of course it wasn't; it would have been too inconvenient. After that, happiness led immediately into competitiveness, I didn't sleep for four days, and Demetrius wound up with a concussion -- oh! And the two of us earned the ire of Rodolphus Lestrange! That was marvelously enjoyable! Most recently? I was happy, and then Antonin wound up in a coma, which he only came out of two nights ago. All things considered, I am beginning to think that this evidence is more than merely coincidental."
She stood up and slammed her little fist onto the table, in a very rare outward show of temper. She loved Barty dearly, but this could not and would not continue. "Bartemius Hallam Crouch, Junior. I won't hear anymore of this nonsense from you! You are not cursed to misery, neither are you deserving of unhappiness. Your father is a miserable excuse for a human being and has always been so. It is no surprise that he chose to handle something in such a poor manner. And it is certainly no surprise that you once again wailed and gnashed your teeth over something outside of your control, that you worked yourself into a frenzy and attacked your friend, and that your irresponsible actions earned the ire of Mr. Lestrange. Damn it, Barty, you. Are. Better. Than. This. If you don't stop this undeserved self-pity right this instant I swear I will never speak to you again."
It wasn't that Barty wasn't used to people putting him in his place -- quite the opposite was true, in fact: he was terribly accustomed to it, and this week had been so difficult because it had involved him being the one to put people (at least, Father and Severus, and his success with Severus really was debatable) into their places. Slumping in his seat and averting his eyes, he clenched his fingers tighter around themselves and only barely managed to get out a small, very terrified, "Yes, Jacqueline."
It had been mentioned to Julianne in passing that Barty would be visiting Friday afternoon. However, much of her late morning and afternoon had been preoccupied with thoughts of getting her new kitten in the next few days. Upon hearing Barty's voice, Julianne leisurely made her way to the parlour as she overheard a noise, then Jacqueline beginning to speak. At first, Juls was unsure whether or not to return back to her room. She definitely understood how, sometimes, Barty could be quite willing to take all such burdens upon himself. But the matter of the fact was that Barty was going through many things. With his family, among friends, Death Eaters, and apparently, ladies. As she turned around to go back to her room, the moment Barty responded those short two words, Juls felt compelled to kindly interrupt.
"Afternoon Barty," she said as she entered the parlour, standing by the door frame.
Had he not already been cowed by her sister, Barty might have startled somewhat when Julianne made her presence known. After all, it was hardly that he disliked her (far from that) and it was not at all that he did not expect her to be at home today, but she had not yet been a part of this discussion. ...Merlin, he never should have agreed to do this. It was pointless anyway, and it was really just showing that every one of his friends had gone insane recently -- the closest one to sanity was likely Regulus, but he'd still gone over as well, since he seemed to think that Barty had any semblance of a chance with Anzhelina, just because Antonin liked him. God -- why couldn't Potter and the Mudblood bitch's friends go mad instead of Barty's? Forcing himself to look up, and trying not to look completely pathetic while doing so, Barty clenched his hands tighter and said, "Hello, Julianne. How have you been today?"
She looked up at the sound of her sister's voice, irritation writ plain on her face. She loved her twin more than life but the last thing she wanted was for her to interrupt when she had just got Barty to stop his self-pity parade, especially when she knew nothing about what was going on. Anzhelina had confided in her and given her the tools to try and make Barty a proper suitor. As much as she hated to admit it, this really wasn't any of Julianne's affair. "Good afternoon, sister."
He hadn't even been here ten minutes and Barty wanted nothing more than to simply go home, read a book, and pretend that this was not happening, had not happened, and never would happen. If he truly was the last bastion of sanity left in his generation -- except perhaps Gaius, as distasteful as his opinions about women were -- then Barty needed to protect himself, not be brow-beaten by his (hopefully temporarily) insane friends. Still, Jacqueline had him here now, and he was likely not going to leave until she said he could, and if Julianne was going to keep him here longer, then... "I don't wish to be untoward, but maybe you should go?" he suggested, his voice once again small, timid, and quavering.
Julianne, to be frank, had never felt so uninvited in her own home. If the two were having an upsetting conversation, that was one thing but to have to transfer those feelings over to her were completely unacceptable. And whatever Jacqueline was doing was making Barty lose even more self esteem. While all that was spoken were merely good afternoons, knowing her friend and twin, much more had been said. She smiled a forced and curt smile before turning her attention to Jacqueline. "You wouldn't happen to be upsetting dear Barty, would you Jacq?" Barty already had so much to deal with.. Thank Salazar that Mr. Dolohov was at least awake. Couldn't he enjoy at least a few days in peace before having to have such a conversation with him? A comfortable soft smile now took place in her expression as she looked politely at her sister.
"She's not upsetting me," Barty answered automatically. His lie was blatantly obvious, from the tension in his various muscles -- especially in his back -- to the vaguely pathetic expression on his face, and his tone of voice all but flat-out said, 'I am lying in a desperate attempt to make this go as smoothly as possible and hopefully postponing my eventual demise.' "We were just talking, Juls. Honestly."
"You cannot use the word 'honestly' when you're not being honest, Barty," Julianne replied, still standing a good distance away from the two. "Well if the two of you were just talking, you wouldn't mind if I joined you?" There was no way that Julianne was going to leave poor Barty alone when he obviously was upset. What possibly could Jacqueline be talking to Barty about that would make him even lie and suggest that she leave?
Ridiculous -- this was all completely ridiculous. It took an unspeakable amount of control for Barty to resist having some form of completely embarrassing breakdown and, at that, he still couldn't keep himself from paling and looking positively ill. Why did these girls feel the need to complicate everything? Georgina had never been like this, nor did Corbina, and Madame Lestrange was a paragon of keeping things serious. Why couldn't Barty just keep his desire for Anzhelina to himself and let her be happy with someone else, as she surely would have been? Furthermore, why couldn't these matters be easy to understand -- or easier, if not outright easy? Barty much preferred differential Asian Arithmancy to this nonsense; at least the rules of differential Asian Arithmancy were consistent.
Jacqueline was, once again, pinching the bridge of her nose so hard it would be a shock if she didn't have a bruise there in the morning. One would think that Barty would appreciate the fact that she was doing him a favour. One would think he would be grateful that she cared enough to go out of her way to do this. "Barty and I are discussing his love life, Julianne. I'm trying to help him out but he keeps interrupting me with his particular feelings of inadequacy that are totally unfounded." So help her god, by the end of this day Barty was going to be a man about this, if it killed one of them.
One also would have thought that Jacqueline, being as intelligent as she inarguably was, would have seen without much effort how unspeakably pointless this was. Barty knew full and well that he wanted above his station by having any sort of desire for Anzhelina -- especially given what sort of desire it was and the sort of things it inspired him to do -- and the fact that no one else appeared to understand this was completely unfathomable to him. It was half-tempting to go ask for Father's honest opinion because Barty at least knew that, beyond the man's recent string of kindnesses, he could rely on Father to tell him what he wanted to hear -- which was the straight truth; which was, in turn, that he didn't have the slimmest chance of ever getting Anzhelina to reciprocate his affections. He was better off sticking to what he knew best: Death Eating, Healer training, and being perpetually without a woman -- besides, being a permanent bachelor had worked perfectly fine for Mister Macnair.
"I would second that if you were actually helping," Barty sighed, "as opposed to simply making me feel worse."
She turned to glare at him, shaking her head. "If you don't want my help than I won't force it on you, Barty. You are free to leave and not ask the one person who knows what you need to do what your course of action should be."
"It isn't that I do not want your help, Jacqueline," he sighed wearily. Why did Jacqueline have to make everything difficult? And why was she so set on completely misinterpreting anything he had to say. "I simply think that you are wasting your time. I am not an idiot; I know that she does not like me, I know that she never will, and I know that, as much as I wish for otherwise, it is completely hopeless because she will simply be happier with someone else. Someone better. It does not make me happy, but I can accept it. Why the rest of you cannot is entirely beyond me."
"She told me that there is a chance she could have feelings for you, Barty." She stated simply.
...What? ...Anzhelina have feelings for him -- that was complete foolishness on a level that rivaled Father's heretofore unparalleled imbecility. It was not that Barty did not trust Jacqueline, especially not given that she and Anzhelina were friends, but honestly. Girls like Anzhelina did not fancy boys like Barty; it never happened and anyone with even a half-functioning mind could see that hoping for it to happen, ever, was folly. "How much of a chance?" he sighed. Naturally the answer was going to be pathetically low. If there even was a chance.
"A small chance now, a bigger chance if you listen to me and do as I say."
Leave it to the philosopher to overlook the importance of numbers. Barty sighed and tightly wrapped his fingers around the edge of his seat in some backwards attempt at staving off the anxiety he knew was going to come. Why couldn't she give him numbers? He needed hard, immutable numbers. "What do I have to do?" he sighed acquiescently.
Julianne sighed softly, remaining frozen on her spot. If Jacqueline had spoken to Anzhelina, then she would have much more of an authority to be speaking to Barty than she had. The fact that Barty knew that he actually stood a chance brought a small smile to her lips. Quietly, she turned on her heels when Barty wasn't looking (his mind seemingly quite preoccupied), gave a small nod and smile to Jacqueline before heading back up silently to the study.
She winked to her sister and then turned her attention back to Barty. "Let's get down to business to defeat this problem." Taking her friend's hands, she led him out the door to the garden, where they could have a measure of privacy in discussing these delicate matters.
Barty followed Jacqueline into the garden without causing a fuss -- and trying very hard not to think about when Anzhelina had grabbed him by the wrists and led him out of the dining room more than a month previously, or about whether or not all the times he had scrubbed his hands after the events of that morning had really made them clean. At least the weather was fair; if they were going to do this, then that was as much in Barty's favour. "We could start with fully explaining things," he offered. "I feel a bit lost, at present."
"What do you mean, lost? What do you need explained to you?"
"Well... what did she say? What do I have to do? What does she want? Why did she decide to give me a chance? What... happened?" And why had girls suddenly gone from being lovely friends and study partners, worthy of respect and veneration because of their femininity, to being so damn confusing? Alecto was almost preferable -- almost. At least she said things quite upfront.
"She wants to give you a chance because you have potential. But you need to relax, Barty. You make her nervous because you're always nervous. You make her tense because you're always tense. Women don't like that. You have to act like there has never been a man as important as you, nor a woman as lovely as they."
There was a very obvious problem with this, though: "But there are several more important men than I. And, besides, there is no shame in not acting like an utter egotist. One would think that that would be more repellent than having humility."
"There is a difference between humility and utter lack of self-confidence, Barty."
"And you think that my condition falls more into the latter category, then, correct?"
"Yes. Unjustly so, because you are wonderful."
Barty shrugged noncommittally. "So I have been meant to interpret from everything that Aquila, Severus, Regulus, and Demetrius all said when I was first afraid that Antonin was going to kill me for fancying Anzhelina, but there is very little about me that is worth such excitement."
She stepped so that she was standing in front of him, reaching up to take his face in her hands so that he was looking directly at her. If her mother happened to look through the windows and see this she would be in for a serious beating, but she didn't care, this was important. "Barty, you need to stop this nonsense. Anzhelina would be lucky to have you. I would be lucky to have you. Any girl would be absolutely lucky to have you."
Barty made a small, discontented noise as Jacqueline took him, and pulled him, and forced him to make eye contact with her. He very much did not want to keep eye contact with her, but she was trying to help him and he'd been nothing but an ungrateful whelp until now. Nodding, he earnestly replied, "Yes, Jacqueline." Whether or not this would stick would remain to be seen, but Jacqueline wanted him to mean it and so, for now at least, he would.
She dropped her hands, her voice earnest. "Barty, when you talk with Anzhelina, don't focus on the chance that she won't fancy you. Focus on the chance she is willing to give you. Let that fill you with confidence, let it be your touchstone, the one thing you can draw upon when you feel your confidence flagging. If you want her, if you love her, you will realize that her giving you this chance is so rare and so special that you would be an ungrateful waste if you let it slip away. Realize that if she is willing to give you this chance, she must see something in you worth loving, worth marrying. Let that be the only thing you need to give you the confidence to talk to her, to be witty and smart and kind, to be sure in that chance she is giving you. Barty, be sure of the fact that you love her, and that she could love you too as long as you allow yourself to be filled with your love for her and nothing else, until there is no room for doubt or self-pity or anything else."
Increasingly, this was beginning to sound like advice that Barty should have gleaned from all the summaries that his mother had given him over the years of the romance novels that she seemed to enjoy so much. Honestly, he had never much seen the point in them; all that he could see them doing was setting some ridiculously unrealistic standard of what interpersonal relations between men and women were supposed to resemble. And, besides that, the writing appeared to be absolutely tawdry. And, more appropriate to this situation, the nagging little voice in Barty's mind that vaguely resembled Father's tone and whose appearance usually preceded the worst of Barty's anxiety was currently popping up and seeing fit to remind him that, even if there were something in him that Anzhelina could have deemed acceptable, asking him not to be anxious was like asking his Father not to be an idiot. Anxiety was his simply default mindset half the time; he couldn't help that, and asking him to change it was asking for him to take on an utterly Herculean task. Why couldn't everything be as simple and enjoyable as torturing and murdering the families of those who would oppose the Dark Lord? Barty much preferred doing that sort of thing; it was easy, and he already knew that he was good at it.
Utterly unsure of how else to answer, he simply nodded again and parroted himself: "Yes, Jacqueline."
"Don't say yes Jacqueline unless you mean it." Here she was being more eloquent than she had been in her life, and that was all he could say?
"What am I supposed to say?" he demanded before he could think better of it. "You're telling me to do the practically impossible and I'm going to try but am I not allowed to have my doubts about its potential efficacy?"
"Did I not tell you ten seconds ago to not focus on the doubts and to focus instead on the chance that it might work?"
"Yes, you did, and I heard you, but... knowing and focusing on the potential risks of every situation in which I could find myself is part of why I'm still alive and unsuspected of the work I do for our Lord -- aside from battles and the like, I am always painfully cautious about warding the homes in which I need to work so that my efforts go uninterrupted. I never remove my mask --" Well, aside from that one time with Riley Quinn's brother, but anyone who had been there to act as a witness had perished, so there had been no danger. "And I am not exactly fond of taking risks outside of my work either -- I can if it's necessary; I mean, I would rather risk anything that would come from Stunning my father than giving my mother a Calming Draught while she's pregnant, but... taking risks has an enormous tendency to get people killed, especially in times such as these. Did you know that there are at least ten different ways in which either party could die attempting to make a strong, Pureblood heir?"
She listened to his rant in stunned silence, unable to believe that she was actually being made to listen to this. "Did you really just compare wooing a woman to serving the Dark Lord?"
Barty immediately wished that he had an anti-nausea potion, or a Calming Draught, or somewhere nice and enclosed to go hide. "Just... just as an illustrative example of situations in which taking risks has incredible potential dangers?"
"Barty, I'm beginning to think that you are literally out of your mind."
Well... it was a step up from people insinuating that he was not masculine, or that he and Regulus were abominations together. "I'm not!"
No one was more screwed up about sex than Jacqueline, but even she wasn't afraid it would kill her. "Well, you're speaking like someone who is."
Barty firmly held that it was not his fault that he knew some of the various ways in which someone could die from sex. He was a Healer trainee; he was required to know these things for diagnostic purposes. "No, I'm not."
She really hoped Barty never came across a case of 'death by sex' or he would be unsalvageable. "I really don't think there's any more advice I can give you at this point, Barty. You're being unreasonable. I think you should go home and think about what I've said." And not write to all your little friends about it.
Barty had no intention of talking to his friends about this, aside from perhaps Severus; after the difficult situation he had encountered this morning, he was too likely to discuss wrong things if he told his friends about this, and Severus was the only one he could think of who would not judge him for this. "I don't want -- I'm sorry, Jacqueline; I'm being an idiot, but... can't you at least try to understand that you're asking me to change a very basic part of who I am and how I exist -- I mean, I am an incredibly anxious, pessimistic person. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't. Why else would everyone's first instinct when something bad happens to me be to send Calming Draught -- to the point that, before he had his coma, Antonin was concerned about how much I take? ...You can't just -- something like that does not simply change immediately."
"As long as you promise to make an effort to change, I'll be satisfied." She refused to comment on the rest of his statement and lend credence to his paranoia. There was no reason to feed the fire of his instability by legitimizing it with further concern.
"...Okay," Barty agreed, nodding his head soberly. "I will make an effort to change. I promise."
"That's all I could ask for."