InsaneJournal

WHO: Barty Crouch Jr & Draco Malfoy
WHAT: Teacher seeks out student
WHERE: Draco's home in St Ives
WHEN: Massively backdated to the week following the Auror raids.

It was an almost overwhelming relief to let the mask drop. Continuing beneath his father's roof had been an exercise in Barty's natural abilities, but a near twenty-four hours in DMLE custody being questioned by a doughy-faced Auror (rude —- he was a Crouch; granted, one who was severely broken after his long stint in Azkaban after years of eating death, but they couldn't have even gotten him Scrimgeour? now that would have been a challenge) before being sent home like a naughty boy had been… trying. Insulting.

Patience was a thing Barty cultivated in spades, but his strength did not lie in overlooking affronts to his person. Perhaps the time had simply come —- the years of living a lie, one of his own careful construction but now, finally, running its course, ready to be peeled off in careful strips -- or perhaps having to look at his father's worn face as he delicately adjusted the Imperius on his return from the Ministry was just that last straw.

He wanted what Draco had.

Which was why, only a few days after his ordeal, Barty found himself on the coastline, on the edge of a ward which felt like it would rip him to pieces if he did not enter the proper way.

“Hello, teacher.”

The blowback of this Ministry raid, heretofore unfelt and only just acknowledged by Draco, had come to roost in the form of Barty. And if his eyes looked a little wilder, if his pale hair seemed to hold rough angles, then Draco would relegate it onto his own imagining.

He extended his hand, expecting to find Barty’s shortly within it. The ward required the only thing the Black family valued at great price -- it required blood. But in this, Draco welled with generosity. He would have never woken to the plight of good Wizards had it not been for Barty Crouch.

And all too well did he understand the crushing disappointment of parental disfavour.

“Give me your hand.”

The wild eyes, pale, were held wide as Barty took in the surroundings. He knew this place. Had been brought here on the rare occasion Bellatrix had the time to offer him personal instruction. Of course this was where Draco had found his emancipation.

His gaze fell to take in the extended hand, pale in the sunshine, before he slid his fingers over the still-soft palm.

"Lead."

Turning Barty’s palm within his, he laid a seam across both their palms, uttering the words inscribed on the ring which had been placed in his keeping (the ring held in trust for him by Bellatrix’s estate, the ring which protected and keyed in the wards surrounding the lands), as their now co-mingled blood fell in languor upon the salt grasses.

And instead of stepping across the warded threshold or walking the dunes to the house, Draco’s chant broke staccato before they found themselves safe within the windswept house.

“Now, you are safe.”

Destroy that idea, Barty wanted to say, destroy the idea that anything could ever be safe, but the house's interior, so immediately familiar and longed for in days in which nothing but memory sustained him, silenced him for a long moment.

This was where Bellatrix had taught him how to truly cut in the way Draco had just demonstrated, a skill he'd passed onto him in their time together. This was where they dreamed their dreams for Regulus. Barty's lips thinned.

"Do you like it?"

“Yes.” Though Barty could look through the lens of the history in this house - the history which lived in his memory - it was Draco’s to simply imagine. But he could feel the power in each and every milimetre of floor and wall. He could sense it in the energy which played off of the tense canto of his teacher’s shoulders.

“Do you?”

"I don't have words for it." Barty sucked in his lower lip in a surprisingly revealing expression, something open and boyish crossing his face as he began to walk slowly down the hall.

"I've left. I won't go back. The game has run its course."

Draco followed, his heels clicking on the floor as he finally drew beside Barty and then side-stepped into the library. Cygnus Black’s personal library, further supplemented by Bellatrix’s own collective tendencies.

“Make this your home. We share a purpose, we are of an accord. Bellatrix would want you close.”

"To safeguard her blood, her legacy..." A drawn out pause as Barty examined the nearest wall of shelving, books both familiar and unheard of filling his gaze. He'd consumed his father's library during his abbreviated school days, and had squeezed the Hogwarts collection of Dark texts dry, but here were new treasures. Had he been anything than what he was, days spent in silent contemplation would now be his happy lot.

But there was Bellatrix's heir to contend with. At once sharp and delicate; a precious thing.

"I accept."

Draco smiled, glad for not only the company but the camaraderie. He understood himself to be a creature that required partnership. And it had been far too long that, with his friends at school and his parents enmeshed in whatever amused them, he felt its true call. His purpose, thus married to Barty’s, would be enough to bind them.

“Good. Pick your room. And …” he paused, head cocked to one side. “I hope you know how to look after horses.”

"I told you, Bella was my dearest teacher." Barty's gaze finally slid away from the books, resettling in Draco as his pale brows contracted. "Why, does her herd remain here?"

“It is. There are a few elves, and I suppose stronger backs than those, which have been conscripted to care for them in our absence. But that being done, the instructions state that we are to take up the mantle, as well. Or I am.” His shoulders ticked up a beat.

“I don’t know a thing about horses.”

Barty's lips pursed, and with that infinitesimal change in his expression, a book came drifting out from a shelf on the other side of the room. "That will be remedied within the week," he said, and caught the volume from the air before offering it to Draco.

"Which room is yours?" he added a moment later, stepping back into the hallway.

“All right …” If these horses were to be part and parcel with his inheritance, he wanted to make his aunt proud. He wanted to be fully-fledged as Bellatrix’s … a breath. “Top of the hallway, before you get to the master.”

Surprise coloured his tone as Barty glanced back at Draco. "Why haven't you taken the master?"

A brow arched; Draco’s shoulder blades met in a beat. “I haven’t earned it yet.”

A pause before Barty nodded, once, both in understanding and approval. "You haven't," he said in mild agreement -- there was nothing accusative in his tone, no reprimand, just acknowledgment of Draco's journey so far and the steps he would need to take in order to proceed.

The next room down would be his; Barty paused before the door. "Bartemius will be wondering where I am before long, and his next step will be to inform the DMLE. I am not here." Beat. "For now."

He took a breath, following Barty to the threshold of his door and he slid to a stop outside it. Briefly with bitten lip, he smiled. “No, you are not.” And then, a pause. “Welcome home, teacher.”