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absolutelybatty
Recipient:chimbomba
Title: A Good Woman
Pairing: Barty Crouch Jr./Bellatrix Lestrange
Rating: R (for animal cruelty that I am not proud of and impolite urges)
Word Count: 1,601
Summary: Barty was a sensible boy with impolite urges, and she was just crazy.
Author's Notes: This is the craziest AU I’ve ever even thought of, and I shouldn’t have been allowed to run with it. Never the less, here it stands. I hope you enjoy. And thank you totwilight2shadow for pulling me out at the last minute with a quick beta read. All other mistakes are mine entirely.
Barty was, if nothing else, a sensible boy. He knew if he made any trouble he needed to keep it quiet. He knew that all those less than polite urges needed to be kept under wraps if he was to indulge in them.
So he was always the quiet one; the loner. He kept his grades up and his chin clean. With a spotless record, there was nothing to fault him on. Not a soul could find a single thing to complain about when it came to Barty. There was, as always, an occasional teacher who got too nosey for her own good and tired to get him “out of his shell”. Such attempts were amusing and easily thwarted. Coming out of his shell would be bad for everyone. At least quietly he was only dangerous to the next door neighbours’ cats.
And it was easy to be quiet when he had his own little secret lab, and, yes, he did find it vaguely amusing and ironic that he used such base terminology to describe the shed in his backyard which, when he was twelve, his father had given him keys to. The talk went a little like this:
“Barty, every man needs an escape. A little quiet time. This is one place where you can be yourself, son.”
And that was that. His father was not one to mince words, and Barty understood him perfectly. This was where Barty was supposed to spend his time so that his father didn’t have to look at him which was fine with Barty. He didn’t understand how he’d failed his father, and frankly he didn’t care.
---
He’d set up a trap just behind the bush with the obnoxious pink flowers that his mother loved so dearly, and it had caught Twinkers, the neighbours’ newest cat addition just as he had planned. He grabbed the frightened and spitting cat by the scruff of the neck and looked into its eyes. And the pure animal fury at being caught filled him. He delighted in the tense animal in his arms.
And he took the poor animal to his shed, closed the door, and turned the key in the lock. The radio came on next, and it blared with loud indie rock music that made his father cringe and his mother close her eyes, put her hand to her forehead, and complain of a headache that may or may not prevent her from cooking dinner that evening. Still it did the job. No one could hear the cat yowling as Barty completed his tasks.
The neighbours’ did, however, inquire as to whether or not anyone had seen their cat the next morning. Barty simply shrugged and mentioned that he might have seen it hiding under the pink flower bush, but it was hard to say.
---
Malfoy dinner parties were always quite the affair. Everyone on the street donned their best clothes, their smiles, and the women sharpened their gossip claws while the men practiced stammering speeches in the mirror that made their lives seem a little less inadequate than they actually were. All in all it was quite the spectacle which, Barty assumed, was exactly what the Malfoys had been aiming for all along.
However, this particular dinner party on the fifth of June when Barty was seventeen was to be even more of a fantastical affair than usual. The Malfoys had promised everyone a surprise, and the dark couple sitting in places of honor by the Malfoys at the head of the table were certainly shocking.
The man was quiet, brooding. He made very little effort to speak with anyone around him. In fact, Barty swore he hardly took a breath the entire evening. He seemed made of stone for all the emotion he showed, and save for the occasional nod in his wife’s direction, he did very little aside from lifting his fork from his plate to his mouth. His wife on the other hand...
Mrs. Lestrange was hard to describe. Barty may or may not have been momentarily overcome by adolescent hormones, and he had very good reason. Mrs. Lestrange wore a tight, possibly leather, dress that left very little to the imagination. She laughed loudly and with a devilish twinkle in her eye as if she knew something that no one else at the table did. Furthermore, she shocked every single lady at the table speechless with many a rude remark. All in all she was a teenage boy’s dream come to life.
---
It was Barty’s parents turn to host the community’s Summer Tea Party which Barty had been informed had started out as an actual tea party. At some point, however, it became an excuse for the adults in the community to sit around and sip at alcoholic drinks while either eyeing one another’s wives in short summer dresses (the men) or viciously sparing with verbal insults of said summer dresses (the women).
Usually Barty did all he could to avoid such occasions. However, he made an exception for this particular event for he had heard his parents arguing on whether or not to invite the Lestranges. On the one hand, his parents were both shocked and appalled about the behaviour of the couple. Mr. Lestrange was as antisocial as a man could be, and when he did speak, he was rough and ill mannered. Mrs. Lestrange—her name, Barty had learned, was Bellatrix and he let that slip over his tongue with a smile—made a mockery of herself by wearing clothes that Barty’s mother claimed “not even a proper whore would consider decent” and flirting with every man in sight.
On the other hand, the Lestrange couple had obviously won the favour of the Malfoys, and to offend the Malfoys would mean the end of the posh life that Barty’s family had set up. They would be shunned, mocked, and forced out. So all in all it was better to keep on the good side of a Malfoy and all their connections in high places.
Thus the conundrum: could Barty’s family somehow avoid inviting the Lestranges to the Tea Party without losing favour with the Malfoys? It was decided that, no, they could not. And so Barty had enthusiastically told his parents that he, of course, would be delighted to join them at the Tea Party this year, and what should he wear?
And when Bellatrix arrived in a short purple number that road high on her pale thighs, her hair frizzy around her face, and her eyes just a little crazy, Barty did not regret his decision to attend.
---
After the tea party, Barty had not seen or heard of Bellatrix for several days, and, for reasons that he put down to simple lust, that made him a little crazy and a lot restless. The neighbours’ cats went missing left and right, his mother had scolded him for somehow going through an entire box of garbage bin bags in less than a week, and he was losing space in the back yard to dig holes.
But he set his traps almost every night, and after dinner on a Thursday, he crept out back to the pink bush to peer at his prey. This time it was a grey kitten, and its pitiful meows brought a surge of rage into his chest. It needed to be quiet. So he picked it up rather roughly and jerked it close. He pulled its head up so that he could look it in the eye and he smiled at it.
“Are you going to sing kitty to sleep?” A voice asked. “The sweet melody of breaking bones?” White fingers darted out to run through the soft grey fur of the kitten that was now trembling in Barty’s arms. “You are a naughty boy, you know that? And naughty boys deserve rewards.”
Barty stepped back to look at Bellatrix. “I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re on about.” He replied smartly, holding the kitten tighter.
“Oh I think you know. I think you know!” She shrieked the last part, and Barty darted a glance at the back window to see if his parents had heard. Bellatrix giggled. “Oh, don’t worry. They won’t hear. I promise to be quiet if you let me watch. I do so love to watch. All the fur and the blood. It’s a pretty picture. I love art.” She reached out towards the cat once more before turning toward Barty’s shed. “Come now, off to the gingerbread house, young man!”
And she ushered him into his own shed, closed the door, and turned the key in the lock before dancing over to the radio and switching it on. She crooned along with the song as Barty set the cat down on the table, and as if compelled by her singing, he did exactly what she had suggested earlier and broke each and every bone in the kitten’s body.
She smiled at him and kissed his lips when he was finished, and Barty could tell it was the beginning of something that he really wasn’t sure he wanted to start but decided to go along with anyway because much like his indie rock, she gave his mother a headache; much like his shed she would be a secret, and, just in case that wasn’t enough for a teenage boy, he liked the look on her face when he snapped and splintered a bone into pieces because he knew it mirrored his own look of rapture. And that was hard to find in a woman these days.
absolutelybattyRecipient:
chimbombaTitle: A Good Woman
Pairing: Barty Crouch Jr./Bellatrix Lestrange
Rating: R (for animal cruelty that I am not proud of and impolite urges)
Word Count: 1,601
Summary: Barty was a sensible boy with impolite urges, and she was just crazy.
Author's Notes: This is the craziest AU I’ve ever even thought of, and I shouldn’t have been allowed to run with it. Never the less, here it stands. I hope you enjoy. And thank you to
twilight2shadow for pulling me out at the last minute with a quick beta read. All other mistakes are mine entirely. Barty was, if nothing else, a sensible boy. He knew if he made any trouble he needed to keep it quiet. He knew that all those less than polite urges needed to be kept under wraps if he was to indulge in them.
So he was always the quiet one; the loner. He kept his grades up and his chin clean. With a spotless record, there was nothing to fault him on. Not a soul could find a single thing to complain about when it came to Barty. There was, as always, an occasional teacher who got too nosey for her own good and tired to get him “out of his shell”. Such attempts were amusing and easily thwarted. Coming out of his shell would be bad for everyone. At least quietly he was only dangerous to the next door neighbours’ cats.
And it was easy to be quiet when he had his own little secret lab, and, yes, he did find it vaguely amusing and ironic that he used such base terminology to describe the shed in his backyard which, when he was twelve, his father had given him keys to. The talk went a little like this:
“Barty, every man needs an escape. A little quiet time. This is one place where you can be yourself, son.”
And that was that. His father was not one to mince words, and Barty understood him perfectly. This was where Barty was supposed to spend his time so that his father didn’t have to look at him which was fine with Barty. He didn’t understand how he’d failed his father, and frankly he didn’t care.
---
He’d set up a trap just behind the bush with the obnoxious pink flowers that his mother loved so dearly, and it had caught Twinkers, the neighbours’ newest cat addition just as he had planned. He grabbed the frightened and spitting cat by the scruff of the neck and looked into its eyes. And the pure animal fury at being caught filled him. He delighted in the tense animal in his arms.
And he took the poor animal to his shed, closed the door, and turned the key in the lock. The radio came on next, and it blared with loud indie rock music that made his father cringe and his mother close her eyes, put her hand to her forehead, and complain of a headache that may or may not prevent her from cooking dinner that evening. Still it did the job. No one could hear the cat yowling as Barty completed his tasks.
The neighbours’ did, however, inquire as to whether or not anyone had seen their cat the next morning. Barty simply shrugged and mentioned that he might have seen it hiding under the pink flower bush, but it was hard to say.
---
Malfoy dinner parties were always quite the affair. Everyone on the street donned their best clothes, their smiles, and the women sharpened their gossip claws while the men practiced stammering speeches in the mirror that made their lives seem a little less inadequate than they actually were. All in all it was quite the spectacle which, Barty assumed, was exactly what the Malfoys had been aiming for all along.
However, this particular dinner party on the fifth of June when Barty was seventeen was to be even more of a fantastical affair than usual. The Malfoys had promised everyone a surprise, and the dark couple sitting in places of honor by the Malfoys at the head of the table were certainly shocking.
The man was quiet, brooding. He made very little effort to speak with anyone around him. In fact, Barty swore he hardly took a breath the entire evening. He seemed made of stone for all the emotion he showed, and save for the occasional nod in his wife’s direction, he did very little aside from lifting his fork from his plate to his mouth. His wife on the other hand...
Mrs. Lestrange was hard to describe. Barty may or may not have been momentarily overcome by adolescent hormones, and he had very good reason. Mrs. Lestrange wore a tight, possibly leather, dress that left very little to the imagination. She laughed loudly and with a devilish twinkle in her eye as if she knew something that no one else at the table did. Furthermore, she shocked every single lady at the table speechless with many a rude remark. All in all she was a teenage boy’s dream come to life.
---
It was Barty’s parents turn to host the community’s Summer Tea Party which Barty had been informed had started out as an actual tea party. At some point, however, it became an excuse for the adults in the community to sit around and sip at alcoholic drinks while either eyeing one another’s wives in short summer dresses (the men) or viciously sparing with verbal insults of said summer dresses (the women).
Usually Barty did all he could to avoid such occasions. However, he made an exception for this particular event for he had heard his parents arguing on whether or not to invite the Lestranges. On the one hand, his parents were both shocked and appalled about the behaviour of the couple. Mr. Lestrange was as antisocial as a man could be, and when he did speak, he was rough and ill mannered. Mrs. Lestrange—her name, Barty had learned, was Bellatrix and he let that slip over his tongue with a smile—made a mockery of herself by wearing clothes that Barty’s mother claimed “not even a proper whore would consider decent” and flirting with every man in sight.
On the other hand, the Lestrange couple had obviously won the favour of the Malfoys, and to offend the Malfoys would mean the end of the posh life that Barty’s family had set up. They would be shunned, mocked, and forced out. So all in all it was better to keep on the good side of a Malfoy and all their connections in high places.
Thus the conundrum: could Barty’s family somehow avoid inviting the Lestranges to the Tea Party without losing favour with the Malfoys? It was decided that, no, they could not. And so Barty had enthusiastically told his parents that he, of course, would be delighted to join them at the Tea Party this year, and what should he wear?
And when Bellatrix arrived in a short purple number that road high on her pale thighs, her hair frizzy around her face, and her eyes just a little crazy, Barty did not regret his decision to attend.
---
After the tea party, Barty had not seen or heard of Bellatrix for several days, and, for reasons that he put down to simple lust, that made him a little crazy and a lot restless. The neighbours’ cats went missing left and right, his mother had scolded him for somehow going through an entire box of garbage bin bags in less than a week, and he was losing space in the back yard to dig holes.
But he set his traps almost every night, and after dinner on a Thursday, he crept out back to the pink bush to peer at his prey. This time it was a grey kitten, and its pitiful meows brought a surge of rage into his chest. It needed to be quiet. So he picked it up rather roughly and jerked it close. He pulled its head up so that he could look it in the eye and he smiled at it.
“Are you going to sing kitty to sleep?” A voice asked. “The sweet melody of breaking bones?” White fingers darted out to run through the soft grey fur of the kitten that was now trembling in Barty’s arms. “You are a naughty boy, you know that? And naughty boys deserve rewards.”
Barty stepped back to look at Bellatrix. “I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re on about.” He replied smartly, holding the kitten tighter.
“Oh I think you know. I think you know!” She shrieked the last part, and Barty darted a glance at the back window to see if his parents had heard. Bellatrix giggled. “Oh, don’t worry. They won’t hear. I promise to be quiet if you let me watch. I do so love to watch. All the fur and the blood. It’s a pretty picture. I love art.” She reached out towards the cat once more before turning toward Barty’s shed. “Come now, off to the gingerbread house, young man!”
And she ushered him into his own shed, closed the door, and turned the key in the lock before dancing over to the radio and switching it on. She crooned along with the song as Barty set the cat down on the table, and as if compelled by her singing, he did exactly what she had suggested earlier and broke each and every bone in the kitten’s body.
She smiled at him and kissed his lips when he was finished, and Barty could tell it was the beginning of something that he really wasn’t sure he wanted to start but decided to go along with anyway because much like his indie rock, she gave his mother a headache; much like his shed she would be a secret, and, just in case that wasn’t enough for a teenage boy, he liked the look on her face when he snapped and splintered a bone into pieces because he knew it mirrored his own look of rapture. And that was hard to find in a woman these days.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-28 06:50 am (UTC)Creeeeeeeeeeeeepyyyy. Me likey. :D Mmmm, thanks for giving me my favorite crazy! I love me some Bella LIKE RIDICULOUS. And your Barty was just the kind of Barty I like, withdrawn and intellectual -- not unlike Tom Riddle. Heeee.
Thank you so much! ♥
no subject
Date: 2010-03-14 06:26 am (UTC)Haha. So I am glad you liked it despite the utter craziness. And, just so you know, eventually there are actual death eater shenanigans, mafia style. :D
no subject
Date: 2010-03-05 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-14 06:27 am (UTC)I feel really, really bad about the cats, I swear.
But I'm glad you liked it enough to comment. :D ♥
no subject
Date: 2010-03-06 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-14 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-12 04:25 pm (UTC)Great job! :)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-14 06:28 am (UTC)