Morsmordre

For the first time in years, Mrs. Crouch reached for the decanter of whiskey in the glass-fronted cupboard and poured herself a drink. Her hand shook, the amber liquid in her crystal glass sloshing dangerously over the sides.

This could not be true. She refused to believe it.

The letter sat open on the dining table, stained by a slowly-spreading spillage of tea which she had dropped upon it as she read. She sipped at her whiskey, though the taste was sour and unpleasant in her mouth. Swallowing nonetheless, she averted her eyes from the folded parchment and stared determinedly towards the window, outside.

A sparrow flitted onto a branch of the great oak that had been planted in the garden hundreds of years before, settling itself down with its head under its wing. The sky was bright and blue, a great white cloud stretching, uninterrupted, over the wide blue expanse. This was her favourite kind of day, one where the air was still and the crisp, brown leaves of late autumn only rustled when they were crunched underfoot.

Mrs. Crouch was alone in the house, save for the house-elf, who had not seen her rise from bed even that morning. She assumed that Winky still thought her asleep, though it was already late afternoon.

Her husband would be home soon, and he would see the letter. She wanted to form an argument in her mind, one that would explain simply why she had neglected to inform him as soon as it had been delivered, but no matter what she said, her husband would not hold back his anger.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and with the imprint of the tree and the acres of land firmly implanted into her mind’s eye, she developed an image of a small, straw-haired boy waving at her from the top of the tree. A sad, choked laugh snapped from between her lips. Barty, she had said concernedly, all those years ago. Barty, get down from there! You’ll fall and hurt yourself!

And then there had been her husband, who had simply stood and watched, as if waiting for the boy to fall. It would teach him a lesson, she had been told. If he fell, then he would be injured, and he would know that he had done something wrong.

But she had been unable to see him hurt, and so with great difficulty, she had climbed up to meet him in the tree. She had been younger then, and he had been only small. It had not been that difficult to sling the boy over her shoulder and carry him onto solid ground once more. She had ignored her husband’s stern words, disproving of his lack of interest towards the safety of their child. Didn’t he understand? It didn’t matter if she had been hurt attempting to rescue the boy. What mattered was that Barty was safe, and that was the only thing of importance.

She stared once more at the letter and finished the rest of her whiskey in one gulp.



Mr. Crouch arrived home at almost five o’clock. While Winky bustled about in the kitchen, preparing dinner, Mrs. Crouch made her way to the door to welcome him home.

He slung his coat and hat upon the stand, pressing a blunt kiss to her cheek. “It’s been a long day, Martha,” he said. “Three trials and all of them with enough evidence stacked in their favour them to fill the entire Ministry.”

“Hard work, then,” she commented meekly as she absently brushed a speck of dust from his robes. “Were they found guilty?”

“Of course, of course,” said Mr. Crouch, as if this was entirely obvious. “We managed to pull through, sent the lot of them to Azkaban.” His toothbrush moustache twitched slightly after he spoke, but he simply turned away and walked with long strides towards the dining room. “When’s dinner, Martha?” he asked, Mrs. Crouch struggling to catch up to him.

“Winky told me—” she began, but stopped dead as Mr. Crouch entered the room and spotted the letter lying discarded on the table. “It came this morning,” she said unsurely, wringing her hands nervously as his eyes scanned over the words. His face morphed from politely confused to utterly desolate, then angry and unforgiving in the blink of an eye.

“They expect us to visit him?” he sneered, as if the very idea repulsed him to the core. “Visit him there?”

“Barty,” Mrs. Crouch said uncertainly, “I want to go.” She took a deep breath, and stepped closer to her husband, one hand touching his forearm. “He’s our son, Barty, and they say he’s… he’s dying.” Mrs. Crouch looked suddenly frail, as if she had developed a sudden and intense illness. The colour drained from her face as she finally spoke the words she had been so averse to even thinking from the moment she’d read the letter. “Bartemius,” she said pleadingly, though her voice took on such a strangled note that it took her husband a second or two to realise what she had said. “Barty, please, listen to me. I know that you… you believed yourself to be right. I know you had to keep up an image—”

“I did not send him to Azkaban to keep up an image!” Mr. Crouch snarled, livid. “I sent him to Azkaban, Martha, because he tortured innocent people and if I had done nothing, he would have gotten away with it!”

“Did you ever stop to think that perhaps he didn’t do it?” Mrs. Crouch said in the smallest of voices, as if she was terribly afraid of the consequences of he words and almost regretted saying them aloud.

“That boy,” Mr. Crouch said in a surprisingly calm tone, “is a Death Eater. You saw the Mark on his skin. You saw it, and yet you still refuse to believe. You are still as painfully small-minded as you always were. He is a supporter of He Who Must Not Be Named, and—”

“But he’s our son!” Mrs. Crouch wailed hysterically, hands shaking as they flew to her mouth. “Our son!”

“As I have told you again and again,” Mr. Crouch said stiffly, “he is no son of mine.” He spoke with such a tone that Mrs. Crouch was quite sure he was not going to speak any more on the matter. Her muffled sobs finally quietened until the room was silent but for Mr. Crouch’s harsh breathing through his nose. “Tell that house-elf to hurry up with dinner,” he said finally. “I’m beginning to get hungry.”



The doctor at St. Mungo’s Hospital told Mr. Crouch that there really was nothing he could do. It was only a matter of time.

It had been a month since the letter had arrived at their door, a month since they had discovered that their only son was dying in Azkaban and that, if they wished to see him one last time, they were welcome to visit the prison, if they so desired. Despite the fact that Mr. Crouch himself had been staunchly opposed to travelling to the godforsaken place at all, his wife was insistent and he really could not refuse her, especially when – and he hated to think it, but it was true nonetheless – she had little time left herself.

She had deteriorated greatly since the letter. Her skin clung to her bones as if afraid to let go; her eyes were sunken with lack of sleep; she was pale and waxen, and walked with a great strain on her shoulders that no methods, magical or otherwise, could remove. The doctor that had arrived at their house by special request had merely looked at her once before ushering Mr. Crouch into a side room and delivering the news with an apologetic face. “I’m very sorry to say this, sir,” the man had said, “but I’m afraid your wife is dying.”

All she had ever wanted to do, he mused as he allowed her thin arm to link with his, was to see her son one last time. His obligations to the visit were not important. His beloved Martha was dying, and she deserved to see her son (he had refrained from calling the boy theirs, as the very thought of being related to such a thing set him on edge), even if it was to be the very last thing she would ever see.

They travelled to the dock by Side-Along Apparition, Mrs. Crouch too weak to do it herself. Climbing into a boat, they simply stared out at the black waves as they moved, inch by inch, closer and closer to the towering rock into which was sculpted the prison of Azkaban.

They were escorted, hand in hand, with the Dementors controlled by the silver-bright, shining Patronus of a Ministry witch. Along the dank stone corridors they went, and Mr. Crouch could not help but feel a sudden sense of equal revulsion and pity. He could not have spent his life in this place, not with the clinging sense of despair that even the Ministry witch’s rabbit Patronus could not remove.

Eventually they slowed to a halt. The witch reached for a key in her pocket, sliding it into the lock and turning it. There was a sharp click. “I’ll give you five minutes,” the witch said bleakly, marching back down the stone corridor while her Patronus paced slowly, keeping the Dementors at bay.

Mr. Crouch peered into the cell. There, through the bars, he could see a distinguished lump against the stone walls, with a shock of straw-coloured hair that was illuminated as the Patronus passed by every few seconds. Mrs. Crouch let out a moan of longing, her hands grasping the bars as she attempted to get closer to the boy. Evidently, he was asleep – he made no movements, nor did he attempt to escape.

“Well, let’s go in, then,” Mr. Crouch said, pulling his wife closer to his side and pushing open the door.

Instantly, as if awoken by their footsteps, the boy stirred. He opened his round, brown eyes, peering between his mother and father with confusion and another emotion that was impossible to place. His ashen face was thrown into sharp relief as the Patronus passed by the open cell door once again, and he blinked at the bright light, holding up a hand to shield his eyes.

“Oh, Barty,” Mrs. Crouch wailed, falling to her knees in front of her son and taking his face in her shaking hands. “Barty!”

“Mother,” the boy said distantly, blinking several times as he comprehended her sudden presence before him. Then, “Mother…”

She was smoothing his hair from his head now, tears rolling down her cheeks as she let out periodical sobs. “What have they done to you?” she was muttering. “Oh, my darling, what have they done?”

He sniffed, instinctively turning his face away from her searching gaze before allowing her to wrap him into her arms. Over her shoulder, he stared at his father with what was clearly a deep and burning hatred. Mr. Crouch looked steadily back, but the boy did not look away, and Mr. Crouch found himself suddenly interested in a particular stone on the wall.

“You cannot die here,” Mrs. Crouch whispered. “I won’t let you, Barty.”

With a sudden sense of trepidation, Mr. Crouch brought himself back into the conversation. “Martha,” he said slowly. “What are you doing?”

For she was rifling in her bag, tears splashing onto the stone floor, and with some difficulty she produced a flask of muddy brown liquid and two small glasses.

“What are you doing?” the boy echoed his father’s words. “Mother, what is this?”

“Potion,” Mrs. Crouch whispered firmly, a hand reaching to her head as she plucked out a single, greying hair. “Polyjuice.”

Mr. Crouch, catching on immediately, strode over and removed the flask from his wife’s hands. With difficulty, he crouched down beside her. “Martha, we came here to see the boy, not to save him. You cannot hope to do this,” he said in a stern whisper. “More to the point, I refuse to let you.”

“Bartemius, it’s not your choice to make. I am going to die, but you can save our son,” said Mrs. Crouch with a sense of finality about her words that Mr. Crouch suddenly realised how futile it would be to try and stop her. With reluctance, he watched as she poured out a small amount of the potion into one of the glasses, dropping in her hair. The potion turned a deep, opaque aquamarine.

She then reached her hand towards the boy’s hair, repeating her movements at a snail’s pace. The boy winced as she tugged at his hair but made no move to stop her, both father and son watching with bated breath as hair and potion were combined so that a black, tarlike substance sat in the other glass.

No words were exchanged as aquamarine and black sluiced down throats, and it was Martha Crouch that died alone in Azkaban while her son was carted away by a reluctant husband in the guise of his beloved mother.