"Mister Barty, Mavis can be bringing you tea if you is wanting it?"
"Thanks Mavis," Barty nodded distractedly at Potter's peculiar house-elf, "That would be great."
Mavis popped away, leaving Barty free to resume his research. He glanced at the information he had gathered from Potter before he left for school, and frowned at the most concerning pieces.
-P. states that V T. attempts to enter his mind.
-P. states that when he does allow T. to enter his mind that he is able to see glimpses through T.'s eyes.
-P. states he gets terrible pains from his scars during these 'visions' and blocks them easily with occlumency.
-P. can feel a 'vision' building from a throbbing in his scar.
It didn't make any sense.
Barty had been home alone since Sev, Potter, and Nott Junior left yesterday morning, he'd spent his time meticulously searching through every tome available to him for any explanation for Potter's link to Timmy with absolutely no results.
He knew that wasn't his job, not the mission given to him, but it kept nagging and pulling on his attention.
There was no record, ever, of two minds being linked in such a way.
He had hoped it would be an easier task to unravel, but instead it was another dead end. Barty couldn't figure out how Timmy was still alive, and he couldn't figure out how Potter had a direct link to his mind.
By all accounts, Timmy should be dead multiple times over. But there were a lot of things about that that didn't make sense either...
-13 years ago, AK rebound on T. 'Collapsed' but didn't die. -4 years ago T. on back of Q.
-3 years ago teenage T. possesses girl through diary (girl dying would bring back T?). P. stabs book w/ sword & T. 'disappears'.
-T. uses P. blood & Paleo-Balkan ritual to gain new body.
"Mister Barty needs to be coming to eat." Mavis interrupted his frustrated musings with a quiet pop, a cup of tea, and a firm admonishment. "Mister Barty can't be hiding in the basement or Mavis will be telling Master that Barty is not listening to Mavis."
Barty barked out a laugh and looked fondly at the elf. Every interaction with Mavis made him think of his fathers house-elf, Winky. The kind elf who'd been more of a parent to him than his father was. "You're bossy, aren't you?"
Mavis puffed his chest out and pointed a long finger in Barty's face. "Mavis is not being bossy. Mavis is being the boss of Master's house when Master is away. And Mister Barty is coming upstairs to eat."
"Yes sir," Barty said. He sighed when he looked down at his research, it wasn't going anywhere right now anyway.
Barty looked around the dining table sadly once he was upstairs. It had been nice, feeling as if he were part of a family. Even if it was the most peculiar family in history. They had all fit together over the summer, finding ways to relate to one another and interact with more than just forced civility.
Sev was obviously the parent, Potter the loud child, Nott Junior the quiet one, and Barty had gotten to be a pseudo-uncle of sorts. It was an odd family, to be sure, but certainly indefinitely better than the one they had all been born in to individually.
And now it was quiet.
Which Barty hated more than anything.
The silence was being left alone as a child, unfit to mingle with the guests his father was hosting.
The silence was Death Eater meetings, questioning who would be tortured next or who they would be asked ordered to kill.
The silence was Azkaban, broken only by his sobs for his mother and the maddening shrieks from his cellmates.
The silence was over ten years spent under the imperius curse, finally the silent ghost of a son his father always wanted.
Barty hated the quiet.
"What do you usually do during the school year?" Barty asked Mavis, scraping his chair loudly as he sat. "When the others are gone- what do you do?"
Mavis levitated a plate of beef and vegetables to Barty and cocked his head thoughtfully.
"Mavis cleans. Mavis isn't cleaning as much in the summer because Master Potter gets mad at Mavis, he is saying 'I can clean up after myself', but Master is very bad at cleaning."
Barty grinned around a forkful of carrots at that, he was quite sure that Potter was a dreadful cleaner.
Potter was more interesting than Barty had even initially imagined. He was an absolute whirlwind of chaos over the summer, hardly a day went by without something fascinating coming from his mouth. And he easily befriended Barty, as if they were equals in some way, a startling shift from the last dark and powerful leader Barty had followed.
But tidy? That was hardly a description that would fit Potter.
"Now Mavis is having to feed and clean up after Stevie until Master can come get him," Mavis shuddered delicately, apparently not a fan of Potter's beautiful new pet. Which was mad, because Barty would have emptied his vaults if he thought he could convince Juliana Zabini to smuggle a king cobra snake in to England for himself.
It was no wonder Potter wanted to become the Minister of Magic, Barty would aspire to lord over the entire world if he'd been gifted with the powers Potter held.
"I can feed him," Barty offered quickly. "I don't mind Mavis."
Mavis narrowed his eyes at Barty. "Mavis is telling Master I will be doing it and I will be doing it."
"Potter probably didn't know you were scared of the snake or he never would have asked you," Barty pointed out kindly. "I can write him, if you'd like, and see if he minds me feeding Stevie."
"No." Mavis wagged a disapproving finger at Barty from his spot beside Sev's stove. "Master Potter is busy with his school and his not dying, Mister Barty is keeping his nose in his own business."
"Alright, alright," Barty held up his hands placatingly. "So that's it then? You just clean and feed Stevie?"
"Mavis is also listening to make sure Master isn't needing him to come save him from a very big and very mean snake again."
Barty sensed a good story here. He kicked out the chair next to him and gestured for Mavis to sit.
"Tell me everything," he grinned.
After polishing off the meal Mavis prepared for the two of them, Barty retired to his room. He grabbed his journal from his nightstand and then laid across his bed, slowing his breathing and trying to focus on the memories he wanted to sift through. He was no good at mental exercises, not like Sev, but he had plenty of practice of burying himself in his own memories to suffice for the time being.
Inhale for five; one... two... three... four... five.
Exhale for seven; one... two... three... four... five... six... seven.
Barty pulled up the day the Dark Lord found him in his fathers home.
'Who's there?' his father demanded, his wand trained on the door.
'P-Peter P-Pettigrew.'
'What in the blazes?' His father slowly opened the door. The door was shoved harshly against his body.
'IMPERIO!'
Barty watched impassively from his invisible place on the couch.
'Are you ready to serve your master once more?'
'I am, my Lord.'
'We will not let Miss Jorkins' information go to waste, will we?'
'No my Lord,' Barty and Pettigrew both murmured reverently with their heads bowed.
The Dark Lord, in his infantile homunculus body, ran a small and disfigured hand down the scales of the giant snake.
'Her death was already most useful,' he said softly. 'Wasn't it my lovely Nagini? The most precious of my belongings.'
Barty pulled up the memory of the night before he'd set out to replace Alastor Moody.
'My Lord, my Lord please,' he begged from his knees. 'Tell me how this miracle was made possible!'
The Dark Lord let out a sibilant noise, a call to his Nagini.
'One day, perhaps, if you prove yourself to be the most worthy of my loyal followers, and after Harry Potter is dead at my feet, I'll tell you of how I explored magic that none others would dare. I have overcome death. I, and I alone, have traveled paths that would make weaker wizards sick to even imagine as I finally conquered the unconquerable.'
Barty shifted on to his stomach, meticulously writing down every syllable spoken, every facial expression, no matter how minute. He combed through the memories carefully. The answer was there, it had to be.
No wizard could truly be forever immortal. There had to be a way to kill him.
Potter gave him his order and he would fulfill it.
He'd never not been able to solve a problem with enough research and work, and he didn't plan on starting now.
Barty was back at his desk, tearing through books as quickly as he could before the first rays of sunshine even graced the sky.
He scanned for mind links or anything that would indicate how a wizard could keep reappearing despite all the evidence pointing to his death.
Well they aren't soulmates, he scoffed at one explanation for 'mind-to-mind communication' in a book from the Black library titled 'Soulbonds for the Sinister'.
Barty set the book aside, intending to pursue it more closely after he'd found a lead on how to kill Timmy. Soulbonds were incredibly dark and illegal magic, as most magics involving the manipulation of the soul were. It was a fascinating subject all covered within a book that only a family as ancient and dark as the Black's were that would dare own it.
Barty looked at the stacks and stacks of books left to dig through in exasperation. It was as if he were searching for a hypothetical golden needle in a stack of silver needles.
But Barty was no quitter.
Even if he was easily distracted by some of the subjects covered in the highly illegal books.
He was furiously scribbling an entire list of curses that could allow a person to duplicate parts of their body when Mavis popped in to interrupt him once more.
"Mister Barty is needing to come eat lunch," Mavis scolded him.
"Mister Barty is busy," Barty muttered, flinging the book off his desk, another useless one when it comes to the seemingly impossible mission he'd been given. "Bloody hell! Why is this so hard Mavis? There has to be an explanation for it in one of these books!"
Mavis picked up a book of the stack from the Black family home and held it gingerly between his long fingers. "Mavis is overbearing that Mister Barty is looking for a way to kill Timmy?"
"Kind of," Barty took a few calming breaths and tried to sort out the information in his own head. "I need to find out how he's alive first, then I can use that information to figure out Potter can kill him."
"And Timmy is the bad man trying to kill my Master Potter?"
"Yes."
Mavis scowled and levitated the book he plucked out of the pile to Barty's desk. "Timmy is an evil, mean, nasty wizard," he said, his voice high-pitched with indignation. "Mister Barty is needing help to find bad Timmy's secrets faster so he will be leaving Master Potter alone. Mavis will be helping him. After lunch."
"Yes sir," Barty agreed quickly with an eager bob of his head. Merlin knows he wasn't coming up with a single scrap of information on his own.
Even with Mavis' help and the two of them going through books twice as quickly, it wasn't until the next night that they finally caught a break.
"Why is some people be calling bad Timmy 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?" Mavis asked, his large eyes were squinting at a line in an dusty book he held.
"People are afraid that even mentioning his name is some sort of curse," Barty murmured. He was pursuing an ancient book of fae curses, questioning if Timmy could have been cursed by the fae with everlasting life. He wrote it on a list of 'possibilities' even as he disregarded it mentally. Timmy said he had 'explored magic that none others would dare', that didn't sound like a curse to him.
"Like a horcrux then."
"Sure," Barty agreed absently as he translated the next line of text in his book. "Wait. What?"
Mavis pointed at a passage in his book and read it aloud: "'And of the horcrux, the wickedest of magical inventions, we shall not speak', like bad Timmy's other name."
"What book is that?" Barty asked curiously. He'd never heard of a 'horcrux' before, and if a book from the Black library refused to speak of it, then it must be especially dark.
"'Magick Moste Evile'," Mavis read the title dutifully. "There is a lot of most evil magics in here Mister Barty."
"May I see it?" Barty asked politely. He scanned the text and flipped around in the book, looking for any other reference for the singular term. "Why...? Why even mention it then?" he mumbled to himself. "Mavis have you seen it mentioned anywhere else?"
"Mavis is not," Mavis shook his head quickly. "Mavis is only seeing the 'wickedest of magical inventions' in this book Mister Barty."
"Hmm..." Barty tapped his chin thoughtfully, internally grimacing at the scruff that was proof of his mission overtaking proper hygiene, as he looked over the neat stack of perhaps 300 more books they had to go through. "'Wickedest of magical inventions'..." He got up from his chair, stretching his stiff back out painfully before sitting down in front of the books. He refrained from trailing his fingers down the spines, some of the books held nasty curses he had to untangle before pursuing, and he looked for any that might offer an explanation of the magic so wicked that 'magic most evil' wouldn't describe it.
"'Dìomhaireachdan Nan Ealan as Dorcha,'" Barty translated the Gaelic title of a book that looked as ancient as time itself. "'Secrets of the Darkest Arts'."
Barty and Mavis exchanged a loaded look after he removed seven nasty curses from the book cover. A new highest record for curses on a singular book. Barty felt a dark tingle go through his body as he opened it; there was undoubtedly a plethora of unknown, illegal, and impossibly dark spells in here. The mere fact it came with seven complex curses on the cover and the actual dark aura radiating from it only supported that theory.
"Mavis, can you write what I read?" Barty asked, his nose curled at the Gaelic text. He couldn't translate mentally quick enough to process the actual words, and a translation spell would no doubt be blocked by the tombs own dark magic.
"Mavis can."
The two of them worked through the night. Mavis transcribed what Barty read aloud, then Barty translated that in to English. It was slow going, chapter by chapter, but when they reached the forty-second chapter- it was worth every second.
"WE FOUND IT!" Barty shrieked. He hugged Mavis in a fit of jubilant exhaustion. "This is it Mavis! This is what he used!"
"Mavis is not understanding." Mavis squinted at the paper Barty just read. "Why is you's so sure this is the wicked magic bad Timmy used?"
"Listen," Barty said eagerly. "This is the spell to 'prepare the receptacle with dark magic to become the receptacle of a fragmented piece of soul and that that piece of soul deliberately detached from the Master Soul to act as a future safeguard or anchor to life and to safeguard against death.'"
It fit. It fit perfectly.
Timmy would have had to travel past the path of traditional magic, an unexplored dark path, to find this and to pursue it. Soul magic was one magic that even the darkest and most powerful of Wixen hardly dared to toy with. To destroy your soul intentionally? A cursed life by unicorn blood would be preferable.
It was no wonder...
Merlin.
"He got less and less sane as time went on," Barty whispered.
'These are the newest recruits Lucius?' Tom Riddle, handsome with slightly waxy features and a thick feeling of intoxicating magic surrounding him, sneered down at the deferent bowed figures of Sev, Regulus, and Barty.
'Yes my Lord,' Lucius said from behind them. 'Severus Snape, Regulus Black, and Bartemius Crouch Junior.'
'Hmm, and why should I accept you in my ranks?' Riddle asked in a deceptively soft, but humane, voice. 'What can you offer me?'
Barty peeked up at him as the spoke, a quick glance at the man his friends convinced him to tie himself to, and felt reassured by the charismatic gleam in his dark brown eyes.
The same room, the same chamber in Malfoy Manor, now only a few years later.
'I WILL KILL HIM! I WILL KILL ANY WHO DARES BELIEVE THEY ARE MY DOWNFALL!' Voldemort screamed, his crimson eyes flashing and spittle flying from his mouth. 'TONIGHT! I WILL END THIS TONIGHT!'
'My Lord... they are undoubtedly protected,' Sev said hesitantly. 'Wouldn't it be best if you waited to see if the child is a threat once he's older?'
'CRUCIO!'
"He... he must have made more than one." Barty was breathless with the realization. "Mavis. He made more than one."
He thought of Timmy's laugh when he said how useful the death of Jorkins was.
'Wasn't it Nagini? The most precious of my belongings.'
Belongings. Plural.
"HE MADE MORE THAN ONE!" Barty leapt to his feet and began pacing. "And I'm sure that Bertha Jorkins was the witch that made one! Nagini! It has to be Nagini!"
"So... Timmy is detaching many pieces of his soul?" Mavis gasped, disgusted and disturbed by the information. "How is it being done?"
"Murder," Barty said grimly, tapping his wand to his thigh as he paced. "He had to kill someone to pull apart his soul."
"He is killing people and trapping his soul pieces in snakes?"
"Probably not all snakes," Barty muttered. He screwed up his face while he thought. "But 'receptacles'... they would be things precious to him."
"Mavis is going to be sick."
Barty paused his pacing long enough to watch little Mavis hiccup and then expel his stomachs contents in the trash bin beside Barty's desk.
"Mavis is not liking to be helping anymore," he said weakly. "Mavis would rather be feeding Stevie than hearing about soul splitting."
"Of course Mavis," Barty said kindly. "Why don't you go lay down?" He looked at the dawning lights gracing his windows. "We've been at this for ages, and this is it. I'm certain of it."
"Mavis will be going to bed," Mavis nodded frantically, desperate to escape the discussion of such a terrible magic. "Mister Barty should be going to bed now too."
"I will soon," Barty waved him off. His body was thrumming with adrenaline at his discovery.
He looked over his notes on the many interactions Potter had with Timmy and felt overwhelmingly smug as he realized it all fit.
It all fit so perfectly.
All that would need done was to discover what the horcruxes were, find them, and destroy them.
Potter was going to be incredibly pleased with him once he shared this information. He nearly wrote a letter to him then and there, but decided he would wait until he could tell Potter in person. If the letter was intercepted, it could get back to Timmy and their newest advantage would be lost.
Barty snagged a few of the books from the 'useless to my mission but I want to read later' pile and settled down in his bed with them. He chose one at random, idly wondering if Potter gave out promotions within his ranks?
If so, Barty will certainly earn one with this information.
He flipped open the first book he wanted to read for leisure, 'Soulbonds for the Sinister'. He chuckled at the irony before he began reading it much more thoroughly than he had earlier. He let the relaxing activity soothe the adrenaline that had been coursing through him.
He could feel his eyelids weighing down as he read on about the many different ways soulbonds could be achieved, the grossest of which involved feeding both matches a vial of each other's blood along with the blood of 'an innocent whose life was taken in a sacrificial act by both matches'.
Disgusting.
Barty closed the book and curled up in his bed, feeling warm and incredibly satisfied with himself.
Potter was going to be so pleased. If Barty could discover the reason for the mind-link between Potter and Timmy then he could even surpass Susan Bones in the ranks. He would work on it tomorrow. If he could find out about horcruxes, then he could figure out how a mind-link could be forged between two powerful wizards.
Barty's sat up abruptly with renewed manic glee as he realized the solution to both tasks he had undertaken was one and the same:
A horcrux.
It wasn't until he had considered the mind-link in the same sentence as the horcrux that it clicked.
Potter and Timmy were soulmates in a sense.
A horcrux would create a soulbond between Potter and Timmy, allowing them to link their minds. It would forge the connection and could have even transferred some of Timmy's powers to Potter, explaining the part of the prophecy where Timmy had marked him as an equal. Potter's 'power the Dark Lord knows not' would be his immense control of his intent based and wandless magic. But... but it all fit.
Timmy's soul must have been incredibly unstable when he attacked the Potter's, and a piece of his soul shattered at the murder of either James or Lily, and it clung to the only nearby and suitable receptacle.
Timmy made Potter a horcrux.
He did it.
Barty solved it all!
...
He solved it all...
Barty quickly lost the thrilling rush of solving such a complex problem when he considered how the one dark solution fit so neatly.
Horcruxes.
A horcrux in Potter.
A horcrux that could only be destroyed, according to 'Secrets of the Darkest Arts', by destroying the receptacle past magical recuperation.
Barty hadn't been able to sleep after that.