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Harry pulls the Time Turner he stole from McGonagall around his neck. Just a few spins with his shaking, bloodied fingers send him whirring back.
Quick as lightning, he obliviates his teachers, the Minister, and himself (thanks for the lesson, Gilderoy), transfiguring a gadget in the corner into a replica of Barty Crouch Jr. and grabbing the real one in under a few seconds flat.
He smiled, Fred and George's Motion Sphere really worked! They'll be thrilled to know that it stopped time just enough for him to work and duck under the Dementor that was looming towards to false Barty.
He pulls the man down corridors and through passages until he gets them to the Honeydukes cellar, empty and silent as the entirety of Hogsmeade was still at the school celebrating his 'win'.
"Go. Quickly." He tells the man, who is staring at the boy like he had never seen him before.
"What?" He asks, Ravenclaw he was but truly dumbfounded.
"Go!" Harry stresses, distraught and still bloody and his arm still unhealed. Barty watches the boy work himself up until he thinks the boy is going to cry.
When the Dark Lord told him of the Potter boy, he never really imagined him as a child. Just an enemy, Dumbledore's precious soldier, the one who would kill his master.
Harry Potter is just a kid, he realises.
"You're letting me go? Why?" He asks, flicking his tongue over his teeth, but feeling less mad than he had in a decade.
Harry looks at him with soft eyes and a sad smile, and says a sentence that broke a man who had been kept a prisoner by his father for thirteen years.
"You were kind to me."
Barty can't stand it, and he flees.
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Barty shows the memory to his Lord, who watches and frowns. Since becoming corporeal, he had found the time to bind a few of his horcruxes back to him. He was no longer quite as serpentine - he had quartz grey eyes and dark hair that fell in soft waves, and his teeth were human except for two fangs.
He whispered in hisses to Nagini, who wrapped her way around him spoke back.
"Keep an eye on the boy."
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Barty was an animagus. Illegal, of course, but he still had the ability. He was taught by Severus in the Room of Requirement when he was fourteen and the man was seventeen.
As he neared Privet Drive (God, he thinks, why does every single garden look exactly the same), he slipped gently into his animal form. It was like sinking into a hot bath after being in the rain. Barty had always been more comfortable in his animal form than anything else, often spending his free time in Hogwarts flitting about in animal form.
With furry brown legs, a small tarantula scales the walls, and enters the open window of the smallest bedroom of No 7 Privet Drive.
"Oh! Hi there, little guy." Harry moves too fast and Barty slams into the boys throat, making him let out a little squawk before covering his mouth with his hands and his eyes darting to the door. A rumble of steps, and in storms a man who weighs more than a troll, his meaty fists raised. Harry flinches at the sound and in the split second before the oaf comes in, he stashes Barty's dazed spider form under the bed to keep him safe.
Bartys hearing is more sensitive in this form, and it hurts when the man howls in the boys face, gripping his hair and mocking the tears that fall from green eyes.
Barty loathes to stay and watch, but his Lord gave him orders.
The oaf leaves a bruised and sobbing Harry on the carpet, and Barty can't help but croon softly and crawl to the boy, nestling his furry body under the boys chin.
The boy is bleeding, and spider in his wishes to taste it, and so he does. Harry doesn't flinch, and he runs shaking fingers over his furry legs. Barty wonders what sort of child isn't afraid of the huge spider he is. While small for a tarantula compared to Australian species, he's still big by English standards.
Then the boy begins to whisper softly, through pearly tears that burn with salt when they land on Barty's legs.
"I like spiders, but you're more intense than the ones who lived in my old bedroom. It was the cupboard under the stairs really, but it was home for ten years. They gave me Dudley's second bedroom when the Hogwarts letters started coming, they thought that someone was watching the house."
The spider inside him, the bigger part of him if hes honest with himself, growls. Spiders take care of their young. They look after their cubs with everything they have.
The boy yawns, and opens his window a little further in case Barty wants to leave, and crawls on bruised limbs to his bed. The bed is too small for him, with only a very thin sheet and a blanket. No pillow, no stuffed animals, nothing.
Even in Barty's house, cold as it was with his father's hateful eyes everywhere, there were toys and plushes present across his bedroom surfaces until he was eighteen.
Barty makes his mind up, and he carefully curls himself up to sleep beside the boys head.
The boy mumbles something sleepily, before his red rimmed eyes close and his breathing evens out.
He feels the Dark Lord push into his mind, a benefit of the Dark Mark, and he doesn't even stir as his Lord views the events of earlier.
"Kill them." His Lord hisses in rage, and Barty remembers that his Lord was also abused by the hands of filthy muggles.
"Gladly, my Lord."
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"Get up boy!" Screeches a woman who looks more horse than human, and Harry shoots upwards immediately.
Barty knows a trauma response when he sees one. He watches the boy fling himself into jeans and a hoodie much too big for him, and he climbs into the pocket before the boy can protest.
"Stay out of sight." The boy pleads, and Barty twitches a leg. Harry sighs and moves, taking the stairs at a run with bruised limbs. Barty seethes when the boy is met with a clout around the ear that makes the boy let out a pained whine for "taking so long" (he had been less than two minutes) and barked at to make breakfast.
"And don't you dare sneak any." His aunt hisses in his ear, and Harry nods.
Still, Harry risks the beating to steal some meat.
Not for him, but for the spider who is in his pocket. Barty feels something in his heart pound, and he realises he thinks he is loyal to the young horcrux.
(Barty is not stupid, and he is the most trusted of his Lord, no matter what Bellatrix boasts. He was a Ravenclaw, and he had helped his Lord gain his body back. He had sought out the horcruxes his Lord asked for (the locket that Regulus had stole not to destroy but to bind back to their Lord who had been losing his mind, the cup and the diadem). He knew the feel of a horcrux against his skin, and he felt it when he brushed against Harry, like he did when he was near Nagini.)
So when Petunia catches his stealing a little more for the spider, and raises a pan to beat a boy who freezes with terror (this boy, who had stared down Lord Voldemort, who had not frozen for even a second no matter what he faced in the tournament, but now froze before a muggle woman who was supposed to love him), Barty loses what little of his collective shit he had left.
He leaps from the pocket and transforms. His wand in hand and he revels in the screams that the woman let's out before he silences her.
Harry is still frozen, eyes swimming with tears, and Barty can't bear to not embrace him.
The kid burrows into a Death Eater's arms like a child with a parent, and Barty realises that he hadn't seen anyone embrace the boy in any way the whole year he had been at Hogwarts.
"Would you cry, kid, if I killed them all?" He asks, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Barty doesn't move while the child collects himself enough to reply.
"Dumbledore says the wards will protect me."
That wasn't a no, and it was also the biggest load of shit Barty had ever heard.
There were no wards on this house.
"The wards failed at least a decade ago. I would have felt them otherwise, but they aren't there. Dumbledore lied to you." He tells the boy, who doesn't look surprised in the least.
"I know. But who else can I trust?" He says, and Barty aches for this child who had had nothing but pain.
"Me." He says softly, and Harry relaxes suddenly, boneless against the man.
"Obliviate them. Make them forget I ever existed." Harry begs of Barty, who furrows his brow.
"It would drive them insane." He tells the boy, because he has been lied to enough.
Something dark and feral, cornered rat-like, lights up in the Boy-Who-Lived.
"Do it."
They leave the muggle house with the screams of mindless shells following them. They sound like an angelic symphony.
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Harry flinches when he sees the Dark Lord, which is fair, they both suppose.
So when the Dark Lord bows, and gives his apologies, neither of them are surprised when Harry straight up keels over in shock.
When he wakes, they explain to him. They tell him of a half-baked prophecy forced out of a seer by a man with twinkling eyes and more blood on his hands than anyone else. They tell of imperius curses and murders and of a culture that was dying because of muggle borns being allowed to enter their world without any culture classes.
They tell him that he will be safe, and they tell him that he is a horcrux. The boy takes it all rather well, but he is helped by Nagini laid across him like a weighted blanket (the giant serpent who calls him brother).
"Do you want to stay, little one?" Barty asks the boy, who he prays will say yes but will not force him to.
The boy nods and curls into the man, and falls asleep.
Barty smiles down at the boy and stays for hours so he doesn't have to wake him, instead quietly reading a book.
He isn't ready for when his Lord enters the room and presses a kiss to his horcruxes temple, and then presses one to Barty's lips.
His Lord laughs as Barty burns red, and he leaves him to stew in his emotions, knowing that they are returned.
A year later, after which Voldemort and Barty dismantle the Order, Harry sits at the table on his birthday and calls to them.
He calls them Father, and Papa.