This is phenomenal and heartbreaking and beautifully written. It flows like water, now warm, now cool, spilling with extraordinary smoothness over the edge into bottomless sadness. The complex grasp you have on the kind of person Dawlish is, and his need to look up to someone, to have his existence (and the world's order) justified by an heroic leader, is compelling and utterly plausible. It's also so painfully sympathetic that I wanted Dawlish, whose blind faith in authority would disturb me in real life, to have somebody reward his rather child-like dependence. He's a pitiful but not contemptible figure, too weak to survive on principle alone, aware and afraid of his own limitations and almost worshipful of those he perceives as inherently pure, incorruptible, or simply imbued with righteous defiance. He's touchingly self-deprecating and self-sacrificing. Even filtered through his central, consuming need, his perceptions of Crouch and Scrimgeour catch at something I can believe worth admiring. He's not entirely deceived about them—although how very different they look through his eyes than Harry's.
The voice pulled me in from the first paragraph, a fascinating mix of pitiful, stubbornly conservative, and strangely humble. The cross between hardline law-enforcement rhetoric and existential fear, each feeding off the other, and Dawlish's conviction that the Ministry is the only thing holding back the forces of nihilism, whisper of his weakness, his denial of a larger picture, the fact that he's a follower who longs for a black-and-white morality. Yet his devotion is almost moving; deluded, yes, constantly shadowed by his lurking sense that the world will fall apart without the supremacy of law. But you do a brilliant job of making us feel what Dawlish feels, and it's difficult to condemn him. His fixation from afar on Barty Crouch, the way he idealizes the singlemindedness and rigid purpose that make Crouch's public actions a personal tragedy, the way he goes from idealizing to idolizing, so that Crouch becomes his sole moral checkpoint, is breathtaking in its naturalness, its pathetic need. You describe Crouch—in fact all of those within Dawlish's orbit—with a masterful double vision: what Dawlish sees, and how Dawlish builds up a private emotional mythology, versus the shortcomings and shortsightedness, the inadequacy and sheer, exhausted human error of his heroes.
The trial is harrowing. Johanna Crouch's grief and Crouch Sr.'s insistence on presiding over his son's sentencing are terrible, and the aftermath is saturated with despair. Dawlish's wish to comfort Crouch, and the betrayal he feels when he hears Crouch calling upon his wife, which prevents him from humiliating himself by offering more than Crouch would ever expect or tolerate—it's all so intensely sad. Even if Dawlish's motives are largely selfish, his agonized wish to comfort a man shorn of his family and his purpose twists my heart. Which is why his ruthlessness is all the more hideous. Dawlish's susceptibility early in the fic to the Dementors' soulless horror makes it even more unbearable that he unleashes them upon Barty Crouch, Jr., revenging himself for what happened to the man whose crusade he embraced and whose downfall robs him of his sense of direction.