Chapter One – I was a Hero!
It was cold. Despite being swathed in fur and velvet, Freya Harvey still felt cold to her core. She dreaded to think how her poor little girl was feeling. With that thought, she pulled the sleeping one-year-old closer to her chest.
She looked down at the baby in her arms. She had grown up so fast in the past year and a half. She had her father’s fair hair, pale skin and freckles, but her hair already had a hint of the Harvey curls and her eyes glimmered deep brown like her own. She was perfect. She was the perfect little angel that she had always wanted.
It had felt wrong at the time; she had still been at Hogwarts when she fell pregnant, and had given birth four months before they graduated. But the little angel in her arms was the definition of perfection. Whenever she held the little angel in her arms, she knew that she had been right to keep her.
Of course, that feeling was being clouded now, as voices from the courtroom drifted into the corridor in which she sat. She would have been in there herself if she didn’t have to look after Natasha. To watch her fiancé get sentenced. To watch the father of her child get sentenced.
She hadn’t thought that he would sink that low. She knew that he ran with the wrong crowds – well, obviously: he was a Slytherin – but to be a Death Eater? To have murdered people in the short space of time that they had been out of Hogwarts? To have tortured two young parents to the point of madness? She didn’t understand how. She didn’t understand why.
She felt them before she saw them. The coldness of the corridor seemed to intensify and it felt as though a thick fog of misery had settled around her. She clutched Natasha closer to her chest, stroking her soft blonde curls in an effort to soothe not only the baby, but also herself. The misery and coldness got stronger and stronger until tears were sliding down her cheeks, and they might have frozen against her skin. As the rattling of their breathing drew closer, she could hear another sound amongst it. Sobbing. He was sobbing, repeating the same words over and over again under his breath, “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t...”
The moment they turned the corner, Freya’s breath caught in her throat. Natasha woke up and started crying. Barty Crouch Jr.’s eyes met hers. He was paler than ever before and trembling from head to toe. Three others were with him and she knew them well also, but it was only Barty who she felt her world collapse for. And then tears were pouring down both of their faces, because she had seen it in his eyes. He was lying. He had done it. He had done all of those things. He was worse than a murderer.
“I didn’t do it,” he pleaded, his eyes searching hers for some sort of belief, but he got none; he just saw tears, “Please, Freya, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t do it.” Again, there was no response. He was shaking erratically now. Drops of sweat glistened all over his skin. “Freya, please believe me! Think of our daughter! Think of how she would live without a father!”
Natasha buried her face in her mother’s neck, sobbing even louder. Freya said nothing; the tears spoke a thousand words as she just stared at her lover as he was dragged into the courtroom. He never looked away. Before the doors closed, he said three last words that broke her heart, “I love you.”
The trial did not last very long. As she sat beside the door, she tried not to listen to the various cheers and hisses and cries and begging. Instead, she played with her daughter, fighting back tears the entire time. Natasha was naive, but she was not stupid – she knew that something was terribly wrong. Where was daddy going? Why was mummy crying?
About half an hour later, an almighty cheer erupted from the courtroom. Freya’s stomach twisted. The verdict had been reached. Barty had been sentenced. To what, she did not know. Please God, don’t let it be the Kiss! The door was thrown open, making Freya jump to her feet. Natasha sat on the stone floor, staring up with huge brown eyes.
