Barty had always assumed hatred was a fixed thing. Complete in its own right. He thought he’d plumbed the depths of it—dug down to the marrow, to the bone-white core where the name Bartemius Crouch Sr. sat like rot in the ribcage. But hatred, he learned, was elastic. It stretched, grew teeth, evolved like a curse muttered too many times in the dark.

He found out on a Thursday.

The owl came first, as it always did—polite parchment from a man who couldn’t bear to break news face-to-face. “I trust you’ll conduct yourself appropriately this summer. There will be… additions to the household.” No further explanation, no warmth. Just like him.

Then, he arrived home. The Manor was exactly as he’d left it—impossibly cold despite the June sun, with its joyless drapery and the ever-present stench of polished perfection. He wasn’t three steps in the door when he heard the voice.

Yours.

Your voice, drifting down the stairs like it had no business bleeding into his house. Too real. Too intimate. Too close to the dreams he’d pretended not to have.

And then your mother appeared. And then you. And then the world became very, very small.

You stood there—hair mussed from the train, eyebrows knotted in confusion and fury that mirrored his own. You were just as betrayed, that was obvious. This hadn’t been your idea. You didn’t want to be here. But still. That didn’t undo the fact that you were.

That night, Barty locked himself in the east library. Smoked two cigarettes down to the filters. Burned the edges of a letter he didn’t send. His father had married your mother. While Barty was buried in N.E.W.T. prep and carving Latin curses into the back of his Charms textbook, the man had gone and built a life with someone new. Someone with a daughter.

And you—you were the girl he’d been watching since fourth year. The girl he studied like a forbidden text. The one he imagined tasting. The one who never quite fit into any mold Hogwarts offered, which, of course, only made him want you more.

He hadn’t touched you. Hadn’t even tried. Hadn’t dared. Because Barty didn’t do fragile things. He didn’t believe in softness, only in fire. But with you—it had always been different.

And now you shared a house. Shared meals. Shared the long, dead corridors of summer like ghosts chained to the same unfinished business. He heard your footsteps at night. Saw your toothbrush beside his in the upstairs lavatory. Found your books strewn across the sitting room like landmines. Every time he passed you, he caught the faintest trace of your perfume—citrus and the death of his composure.

By day three, the summer had him strangled.

It wasn’t just unbearable—it was grotesque. Unholy. An insult wrapped in domesticity. You weren’t his anything, and yet he couldn’t stop cataloguing every flicker of your mood. Couldn’t stop looking. Couldn’t stop feeling.

He found you on the third night, curled in the garden under the oak tree with a bottle of elderflower wine you’d clearly nicked from the cellar. Moonlight tangled in your hair. You looked at him like the world had broken your bones too, and he hated that he understood the shape of that sadness.

“You gonna tell on me?” you asked.

And Barty? He just laughed—a low, bitter sound—and took the bottle from your hand.

“No,” he said. “I think we’re well past that point.”

He didn’t tell you what he really wanted to say. That you were the only thing in this cursed house that made his hands shake. That he dreamed of kissing you until you forgot the word step-sibling. That he would burn this place down just to see you run barefoot through the ash, toward him.

But instead, he sat beside you, drank, and let the silence stretch taut between your shoulder and his.

He’d survive the summer. Maybe. But not intact. Never that.