Loyalties | Barty Crouch Jr

The Impersonation

October 22, 1977 - Saturday

That Saturday morning, Leonora and Barty sat in the library after breakfast, discussing their course of action for the day. Leonora had already snuck a sleeping potion she had lied to Madam Pomfrey to get, into Thalia's pumpkin juice at breakfast when she wasn't paying attention. She would be knocked out for the next couple of hours.

Now, all she had to do was drink the potion.

"What exactly should I do once I turn into Thalia?" Leonora asked Barty. She couldn't really remember the point in all of this.

Barty only shrugged. "I don't know. Talk to some of her other friends, learn some secrets. Maybe you could learn more about the Dark Lord. That could certainly help us for the future."

Leonora huffed in annoyance. "I don't like her other friends."

"They're not so bad," Barty disagreed, only because most of them were his friends too. "Plus, she likes them, obviously. So you can't just avoid them."

The girl sighed. "I know. Let's head to the Prefect's bathroom, then, so I can drink the potion and get this over with."

.........................................................

As the two friends reached the Prefects bathroom, Barty reached into his pocket and pulled the Polyjuice potion out, handing it over to Leonora. She brought it up to her face, inspecting it with a disgusted look.

"Is it too late to back out?" she questioned, partly serious, partly a joke.

"Unfortunately, yes," Barty answered as he lightly pushed her towards the door. "I'll be waiting out here."

Leonora sighed. "This better work, Barty. You better hope that I come out of that bathroom looking like Thalia."

"We brewed it perfectly, Nora," he reassured her. "I think you'll be fine."

She only glanced at the boy and took a deep breath, before entering into the bathroom. It was her very first time stepping foot into the room, and it truly took her breath away. At the very edge of the room, sat an incredibly large bathtub surrounded by windows, with a beautiful stain glass window of a mermaid directly in the middle.

Off to the side of the room, were multiple toilet stalls lined up against the walls. She made sure to peer beneath the doors, double checking that no one else was in there. After confirming that she was fully alone, she made her way back over to the bathroom door to cast colloportus, just in case Barty struggled to keep any of the other prefects out.

Moving over to the side of the tub, she sat down and peered at the potion once more. It looked truly disgusting, and she hoped that she could successfully stomach it, otherwise all of their hard work would be for nothing.

Popping the cap off of the phial, she wasted no time in drinking the potion. With a deep breath, she brought it up to her lips and flung her head back, allowing the thick sludge to trickle down her throat.

She gagged a bit at each swallow, but was ultimately able to keep the potion down with a scrunched nose and look of disgust on her face. It had tasted like something rotten, although she couldn't put her finger on what exactly it could be. She did, however, find the taste to be very fitting to Thalia.

Leonora sat there for a few minutes, worrying that something had gone wrong with the potion, because she wasn't changing.

Just as she was about to stand up and tell Barty the bad news though, her body started to ferociously burn, and she could feel her bones cracking and stretching as they changed to mimic Thalia's.