InsaneJournal

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NAME: Kassie
AIM/EMAIl: SailorStarPoet / duanya@gmail.com
INVITE: ALREADY HERE.

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NAME: Bartemius Hallam Crouch, Jr.
BIRTHDAY: February 21st, 1961
AGE: Well, technically he’s 64, but due to the lovely magic of the Department of Mysteries, he’s physically about 35 and mentally… all over the place.
HOUSE/YEARS: Slytherin / 1972 – 1979
PARENTS: Bartemius Crouch Sr. and Demeter Crouch nee Burke, both deceased.
SIBLINGS: None.
PLAY/NON PLAY SIBLINGS: N/A.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Not that they've seen each other since the early 1980s, but Jacqueline Wilkes, kind of.
CHILDREN: He only just learned that they exist, but: Iscariot Bartemius Wilkes-Crouch, Demeter Julianne and Josiah Aquila Wilkes-Crouch, Georgina Hester Wilkes-Crouch, Aquinas Julianne Wilkes-Crouch, and Hallam Caspar Wilkes-Crouch.
SEXUALITY: Well, that’s difficult. Before he went to Azkaban, he was approximately bisexual; afterwards, he was still bisexual but didn’t care because all he cared about was the Dark Lord; now… he’s really not sure after having had his soul taken out and put back in.
OCCUPATION: Department of Mysteries Experiment

APPEARANCE: Once on the decently tall side for a man, Barty Crouch is now the quite average height of 5’10”. He’s incredibly slim, quite physically unthreatening, and, overall, has the look of someone atrophied: there isn’t any way in which physical force from him would really hurt and, even if he could, he’s too sedated to really be able to be forceful. Because of the magic used in the DoM to keep his age from complicating any experiments, he’s hardly aged since he was brought to them in 1995, a soulless wretch. While he’s usually at least clean, his straw-colored hair is usually in some state of being unkempt, he sometimes doesn’t shave for several days (not that he’s really allowed to shave or perform shaving charms for himself; his access to sharp objects and wands is strictly monitored), and he’s incredibly lethargic and usually can’t be arsed to care about what he’s wearing anymore. He likes black.

PERSONALITY: Barty is, suffice to say, complicated. He’s always been complicated, but now he’s complicated for different reasons: now, instead of being the easily detached, Dark Lord-loving, manipulative evil genius he was in his youth and the part of his adulthood that preceded his Dementor’s Kiss, he’s simply unpredictable. “One day at a time” is a phrase that is well-applied to Barty, since trying to guess what sort of mood he’s going to be in or what’s going to set him off is like trying to find the hay in the needle-stack. Most of the time, he’s very to-the-point and matter of fact, with an airy sort of voice and unperturbed manner of handling everything, acting as though he’s on lithium… which isn’t that far off, given the number of sedative spells and potions that get forced on him. He’s easily and genuinely interested in trifling things and repetitive behaviors, and he makes himself useful by cleaning things, which makes him very happy to do. He’s actually not a bad conversationalist when he’s sedated – he’s cordial, and nice, and it’s obvious to anyone that his undeniably great intellect hasn’t been affected by the process of being Kissed and having his soul restored, there’s no brain damage to be seen at all, whether natural or magically inflicted – but he’s unnerving to some because, even sedated, there’s a quiet desperation to him; a strong but silent yearning to be free.

Barty hasn’t been quantifiably free in his entire life, and, really, he could handle being physically imprisoned. Hell, he was in Azkaban; he could survive any kind of physical imprisonment after being in there. For too long, Barty’s mind has not been his own and this fact has started to grate on him quite a bit. At least in Azkaban, he could focus; he could think about things other than what the Dementors wanted him to remember and, even if he failed, his brain still belonged to him. Being placed under the Imperius Curse was the worst kind of prison for him and, really, it was more painful to him than the Cruciatus Curse: he had perceived that everything was being dictated for him, but under the Imperius it actually was; he would break free to be in places without knowing how he got there, or what he was doing; sometimes, he would go for months without freedom and would have to have the time filled in by Winky. The sensation was, to him, like drowning without water, and he passionately hated all of the Death Eaters who escaped having to suffer the comparative picnic of Azkaban. They weren’t dedicated enough to the cause to risk something so small for the Dark Lord, and he had to suffer this for his faith and devotion. His brain belonged to his father and, while he had a reprieve for almost a year before getting Kissed, soon everything was black. Then, he got his soul back, only to have his faculties removed from him again through the “creative” application of sedatives, which he’s rather not pleased with.

…So, suffice to say, he’s a bitter little ball of bitter. He’s angry, and he’s … well, faintly pathetic, actually. If he isn’t on his sedatives, or if they start to wear off, the desperation that’s so obvious about him becomes moreso: yes, it’s true, he tortured and killed several people, he helped drive the Longbottoms into insanity with the Cruciatus Curse, he fervently dedicated his life to the Dark Lord, and he spent much of his earlier life obsessively focused on killing his father… but he’s literally lost everything. His best friend died under mysterious circumstances; his mother died and couldn’t even have a proper funeral; the feelings of success he felt when he killed his father and revived the Dark Lord were completely short-lived; anyone he actually looked up to, from Bellatrix to Antonin Dolohov, is dead; his so-called friends died or, by Barty’s estimation, turned traitor, which leaves him to wonder if they were ever really friends at all; the cat he owned from 1979 to 1982 (Achilles) is absolutely dead by now and he has no idea what happened to the poor thing; he lives in the basement of the Ministry, rarely deciding things for himself, with restricted access to almost everything, and barely allowed to go visit the ghost of Octavius Pepper up in the DMLE without getting into trouble; and he’s almost never allowed to actually feel things because it might be “dangerous” for him to do so. This all comes out in spades when his sedatives start to falter and he becomes twitchy, highly reactive, and, in all fairness, potentially dangerous. Sometimes, all he’ll do is sit in the corner of his room and talk to his stuffed tiger; other times, he’ll manically clean his room or any other space; other times, he’ll idly venture up to the DMLE; other times, he'll shake and cry uncontrollably; and other times, he’ll snap completely and desperately rant at someone before attempting to hurt himself or someone else.

…It’s worth noting that the last occurrence has only happened once. But still. He hurt himself rather badly that one time and, suffice to say, it’s taken a fair amount of convincing people to get his journal, quill, and ink.

banner by parisian ♥

HISTORY: If one were really interested in the history of one, Barty Crouch, Jr., there are rather large files in both the Department of Mysteries and the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and they both have mostly the same things to say about him. He was the only son of the prominent, Pureblood union between DMLE head Bartemius Crouch Sr. and his lovely wife, Demeter Crouch nee Burke. As a boy, Barty Jr. worked tirelessly to please his father, never garnering as much as a pat on the head and an acknowledgement that he’d done a good job. If he had gotten those things, several atrocities could have been avoided, the first of these being Barty’s almost complete psychological collapse following a series of events that included: his failure to make Prefect in his fifth year (which was not helped by his loss of the title to his best friend, Regulus Black); beating himself into the ground to get Outstandings on all twelve of his OWLs only to have his father completely fail to acknowledge him; and rumored sexual abuse (though this is absolutely unsubstantiated; Barty has always refused to say whether or not the rumors are correct, and he is too attached to the memories of the two likeliest hypothetical perpetrators [his mother and Hogwarts professor, Horace Slughorn] to sully them with such allegations).

The desire to please his father gave the young Barty a highly obsessive personality – best exemplified in his eccentricities, which have been diagnosed, in hindsight, as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder – and the lack of love, or even just respect, that he gained from his father coupled with the intense love he had for his mother gave him a strong, patricidal obsession and the compulsive need to seek father figures, the list of which included Horace Slughorn, Antonin Dolohov, Rodolphus Lestrange, and the Dark Lord himself. The extent to which Barty repressed everything about himself (including, according to some, homosexual urges, especially a homosexual love of Regulus Black) created a psychological detachment in him: he began to explode into private bursts of uncontrolled rage, then would not know what had happened afterwards and his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder only worsened. From his sixth year on, he wished for only two things: to gain the love and respect he had always lacked, from whoever he could; and to completely unmake his father, forcing the man to suffer for all the wrongs Barty felt that he had suffered.

Sometime in between their sixth and seventh years, Barty and Regulus joined the Death Eaters and began climbing through the ranks of the Dark Lord’s followers; following the Christmas holidays of their seventh year, they did not return to school, although they both took their NEWTs, on which Barty earned nine Outstandings. He took part in an attack on a hippie commune in Soho, severely injuring Sirius Black, as well as an attack in Diagon Alley, in which he nearly killed Octavius Pepper, and the battle in which Evan Rosier and Georgina Wilkes died and Alastor Moody lost one of his eyes and part of his nose. These were only a few of the attacks he helped perpetrate in the Dark Lord’s name. His father kicked him out of the family home in June 1979 in a misguided attempt to make Barty learn to stand up for himself that only made Barty more fervent in his devotion to the Dark Lord.

Under the private guidance of Bellatrix Lestrange and Antonin Dolohov (who also gave Barty public guidance, serving as the younger man’s mentor in the Saint Mungo’s Healer Training Program, which he joined in August 1979), Barty became well-versed and well-schooled in Dark magical theory and the use of the Dark Arts. He brutally tortured and murdered: the parents of Lily Evans-Potter (forcing her to watch, but leaving her alive); the parents and younger brother of Adelaide “Riley” Quinn-Lovegood; the husband, son, and son-in-law of Millicent Bagnold; several of Rufus Scrimgeour’s siblings; and Bertram Aubrey, amongst many others – and he found the love and respect he had lost in his childhood, whether it was in the maternal figure of Bellatrix Lestrange, the paternal figure of Antonin Dolohov, having a sense of camaraderie with his fellow younger Death Eaters (among them, Regulus Black, Aquila Avery, and Severus Snape), or simply getting patted on the head when he did a good job.

Because of his admittedly brilliant cover story (after all, who would suspect that the nice, quiet son of the DMLE head was a Death Eater?), he escaped suspicion entirely, even after the being horribly distraught after losing Regulus Black to a mysterious death/disappearance, losing Dolohov to Azkaban for the murders of Fabian and Gideon Prewett, and losing the Dark Lord to his defeat by Harry Potter. He likely would have gone unsuspected as well, had he and the Lestranges gone looking for a way to bring the Dark Lord back. Bellatrix Lestrange came to the conclusion that Frank and Alice Longbottom had knowledge of the Dark Lord’s whereabouts, and she, Barty, Rodolphus, and Rabastan took part in the extensive torture of the couple, breaking their minds with the Cruciatus Curse before they accepted that the Longbottoms didn’t know anything. The four of them were caught shortly thereafter, and they were only given a trial after Demeter Crouch pleaded to her husband; it was, by all appearances, a complete and utter sham, and they were sentenced to life in Azkaban in January 1982.

Azkaban only worsened the psychological damage that had already been done to Barty and deepened his commitment to the Dark Lord. He had inherited his mother’s poor constitution as well, and prison nearly killed him physically; he was only kept psychologically alive by the obsessive hope that the Dark Lord would come to save him. …Well, he did get salvation: using the Polyjuice Potion, the Crouches conspired to exchange Demeter for Barty Jr., which they did in April 1983; she died bearing his appearance and the family faked her death shortly thereafter, in early May. The House Elf, Winky, nursed him back to health and, once she had, he was both overjoyed with the suffering that he had left his father with (the man had, after all, fallen from grace when it seemed as though he had his dream of being Minister for magic in the palm of his hand) and determined to go seek the Dark Lord out and bring him back; all of this was short-lived. Almost as soon as the young man was healthy again, his father subdued with him with the Imperius Curse. Throughout the next eleven years, Barty fought with his father for control of his own mind, praying for the Dark Lord to come and grant him salvation.

And, finally, the Dark Lord did so: shortly after the 1994 Quidditch World Cup, at which Barty Jr. fired the Dark Mark with Harry Potter’s wand, and Winky’s subsequent dismissal, the Dark Lord and Peter Pettigrew came and freed Barty from his servitude, using information they had gathered from Bertha Jorkins. Using the Polyjuice Potion once more, he went to Hogwarts disguised as Mad-Eye Moody, who had been hired to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and, in his position, he single-handedly engineered the scheme by which Harry Potter became a contestant in (and the winner of) the Triwizard Tournament, Cedric Diggory was killed, and the Dark Lord was revived. He nearly killed Harry Potter, but was figured out by Albus Dumbledore and given Veritaserum, and thus forced to elaborate on his entire scheme. Everything would have gone alright, Barty even had an escape plan… but Cornelius Fudge came accompanied with a Dementor.

And this is really where the story should have ended, but, fortunately for Barty and for the advancement of Wizarding studies, it wasn’t. Rather than simply wasting away, a soulless wretch, in Azkaban until he died, Barty was claimed by the Department of Mysteries for an experiment they wanted to perform. (Well, he did spend several months in Azkaban, due to the complicated paperwork, but he was in the DoM by Halloween.) The process was long, arduous, and perpetually put off because of administrational red tape and the second war with the Dark Lord. Finally, though, they managed to reclaim Barty’s soul and put it back into him; they succeeded in 2023 and have been observing Barty since then, to see the long-term effects of the process. …Well. …There’s a lot to be said. He has his own room in the basement, furnished with a bed, a desk (he isn’t allowed most desk furnishings, but he still has one), a bookshelf with a fairly extensive library, a dresser of clothes, and several stuffed animals (a tiger, a penguin, a giraffe, and a very simple teddy bear). He’d really like to go outside, but given what he’s done and that he gets in trouble for adventuring up to the DMLE, that doesn’t look likely, even if he is heavily sedated most of the time.

Also, recently, it's come to his attention that his old girlfriend, Jacqueline Wilkes, agreed to have his children as part of another DoM experiment while he was still a vegetable. Honestly, Barty's pretty surprised by this: he loved Jacqueline a great deal, but the fact of the matter is that they mostly started their courtship (read: their repeated, wanton sleeping together) because: Anzhelina Dolohov, love of Barty's life and Jacqueline's best friend, was shipped to Russia after her father went to prison and Druella Black had palpitations at the thought of her marrying Barty; Aquila Avery, love of Jacqueline's life, was chased out of the country and took to rallying support for the Dark Lord in France; Regulus Black, Barty's best friend, went missing; Julianne Wilkes, Jacqueline's twin sister and Regulus's fiancee, ran to France to disguise her pregnancy; Astra Avery married Marius Lestrange and, throughout 1979 to 1981, almost all of Barty and Jacqueline's friends and loved ones died or had to leave the country. So they had a lot of feelings to work through and sort of planned on getting married eventually, but never got around to it. When Barty got back up to his old tricks during the '94-'95 school year, he planned to sex up and marry Jacqueline shortly after reviving the Dark Lord... but that obviously didn't work out so well. The fact that she had his children... is more than a little mind-boggling, all things considered.

Anyway, there are six of these lovely little experiments -- Iscariot Bartemius, Demeter Julianne, Josiah Aquila [Barty sees what you did there, Jacqueline], Georgina Hester, Aquinas Julianne, and Hallam Caspar -- running around. Their entire family is wholly controversial, but all he really wants it to be allowed to meet his children. Unfortunately, at least Demeter and Iscariot seem to be pretty averse to that idea, and Barty... really has only spoken with Demeter once, but, in his opinion, she doesn't deserve to be named for his mother. At least there's Hallam, though, Barty's mirror image in several ways -- Barty likes the little one. The little one's giving him a chance. :|

comic by Kate Beaton ♥