Pairing: Moody/Crouch.

Rating: PG-13, implied sexual content.

Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended. Characters owned by J.K. Rowling.

Summary: Bartemius Crouch receives unjust orders...

Author's Notes: Well, Coffee, this is what your bunny reaped. Minerva McTabby, this is your doing (I want another one!).

He set down his quill and stared. The scribbled lines of Greek letters meshed with sharp runes and symbols not found in any speakable language. Bartemius drummed his fingers on the desk.

"Has to be a factor I'm missing. This is absurd," he muttered to himself. Reaching to his hip, he tugged loose the flask and took a swig, wincing as a taste like the backwash from a night of drinking and kebabs hit his tongue. Swirling the flask's meagre contents, he snarled at the page once more.

In the tangle of formulae, there lay the answer to a question he'd almost been afraid to ask: was there a way to indefinitely extend the effectiveness of Polyjuice Potion? Bartemius glanced at the trunk sitting near his desk. In it lay a witness - a necessary living witness - to the events leading to the Dark Lord's rebirth. Should said witness shuffle off the mortal coil, the potion's effectiveness would shuffle off with it (to put it mildly). Should he live, though... well, this whole "reviving the Dark Lord" business was complicated enough without an insane ex-Auror adding his own two Knuts, wasn't it?

He growled once more at his notes and shoved his chair back. Not for the first time, he questioned why Lord Voldemort needed the entire school year to bait a teenage boy when some candy and a nudie magazine would work just as well. "Stupid, sodding, bollocking, arse, feck, shite..."

Still grumbling, he shoved his chair back and clumped towards the trunk. His magical eye swiveled: through one heavy, stone wall he caught a glimpse of that Chang girl playing a game of lip Quidditch with one of Potter's rivals. Diggory? Diggory. The door burst open, and both students tried to fix their uniforms while Professor Flitwick barked something Barty didn't need to hear to get the gist of.

Bartemius sighed and rubbed his good eye. In the last weeks he'd seen students making out, students wanking, teachers wanking, Snape in women's knickers (and not much else), and, on one especially painful occasion before he'd gotten the hang of the eye, exactly what Dumbledore wore (or didn't) under his robes. He shuddered. His good eye rolled skywards. "The things I do for you, My Lord."

He paused for a moment, staring at the trunk. His nose wrinkled. Why, why, why did it have to be that fucking Auror? Why couldn't it have been someone like Lucius? Or Walden? Walden's got Ministry contacts. Hell, Snape. Snape's nice enough in those knickers. And he bathes more often. Probably.

Still, there was no changing fact. His calculations were, though messy, as accurate as he could figure them and they pointed towards only one course of action. It was just time to... ah... suck it up.

He groped in his pocket for the unwieldy cluster of keys he'd nicked from Moody. "Oh, no, it couldn't be blood, now could it?" he muttered. "No, that would be too easy. No saliva, no sweat, can't just scrape it off my fingers. Oh, no, and nothing that comes out on its own!"

He threw the lid open with a bang. A limp figure, patches of scalp visible through the wild grey tangle of his hair, had turned over on the stones. He snored softly - Bartemius made a note to recalculate that dose of Sleeping Draught, if only to keep down the noise - and had flung his arms wide. "Mm... Cornelius..." he murmured, a slight grin appearing on his grizzled face.

Bartemius shuddered. He Dark Marked himself and took a step into the depths for what he feared was simply another way for life to point and laugh.

For a minute, he stood there, staring down at Moody with curled lip. He tried to kneel; his legs didn't agree with that "bending" issue. Come on, what are you? Some sobbing nancy b--never mind that. You've seen this man naked in the mirror every day for two months now. What's it going to hurt, doing it without the mirror?

Ah, yes, old man, came another voice in his head, but at least you bathe regularly. He, on the other hand, has been down here since September without more than a quick Cleansing Charm, and you've never wanted to get that close to anything below the waist. To say he might be a bit rank is sort of like saying the Dark Lord might be a bit peeved with a few things once you've got him back in one piece.

"Shut up," Bartemius growled at the voice. Squirming only a little, he pulled out his - well, Moody's - wand and flicked it at the snoring, muttering figure, casting what he hoped was a thorough Cleansing Charm without really looking where he was casting it. Cursing himself, cursing the damned Auror and that stupid rat, cursing Arithmancy and Potions and Snape in women's knickers, even coming right to the verge of cursing Lord Voldemort (who'd ordered him into this mess in the first place), Bartemius crouched, undid his double's trousers, and leaned over for what he rather expected would rank with Azkaban as one of the more horrific events of his life.

In the interest of those with slightly more delicate constitutions, we shan't go into the more graphic details. We shall simply say that it was rather more pleasing for one than the other, if the mutterings of, "Oh, Corny," and, "Fecking snake," were any indication. It was over mercifully quickly, although no matter how tightly Barty kept his eyes shut he still ended up with certain imagery seared into his already unstable little brain.

With a slurp and a careful groan (so as not to damage the vile substance in his mouth), he wrenched his head up. Groping in his pocket for an empty vial, he suddenly wondered how much worse a witness could be. After all, there was something to be said for posterity.

Suddenly, Moody's eyes flew open. Barty stifled a yelp before he could spray his dubious prize all over the room. One scarred hand reached up and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, yanking him down to eye level. The lone dark orb squinted at him like a weasel sizing up a nice, juicy vole.

"Hunh," Moody muttered, "never been that good before. Need to have a wank like that more often."

Bartemius blinked. Given the choice between screaming like a girl or Obliviating both of them, he took the third option. He yanked a heavy glass vial from his pocket and thunked Moody a good one across the head.

Moody's eye rolled back and he went limp on the stones. His hand eased its grip and slid away (copping a quick feel along the way, if Bartemius wasn't very much mistaken). Pulling himself free and rushing to his feet, Barty started to spit the now-somewhat-diluted, utterly foul substance into his vial.

Unfortunately, it seemed as though part of said vial was now firmly lodged in Moody's head.

Throwing the rest of the glass into the corner, he rushed for the ladder and tore out of the trunk as fast as he could. He barely reached an empty cauldron in time to spit his mouthful into its iron depths. He continued spitting for the better part of a minute until only the bitter, tingling sensation of a blowjob well done lingered on his tongue. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "I," he snarled, "am never doing that again!"

Still muttering, he grabbed the cauldron and dragged it over to the desk to look at his notes again. He dropped it with a resounding BOOM! A gnarled finger ran along each line of smudged calculation. Suddenly, it stopped.

Five lines down was a little mark that might have been a smear and might have been a lower-case iota. He squinted. Then stared. His jaw went slack.

The sound that echoed from the Defence Against the Dark Arts' instructor's office that evening scared two Slytherins, a Gryffindor, and a Hufflepuff out of their carnal revelries, and sent the ghosts gossiping about a new spectre macking on the scene. When it finally died, there was a long moment of silence. It was broken by a single sob. A cauldron echoed in a way cauldrons were never meant to do.

And that, children, is how Bartemius Crouch learned to pay attention to his teacher when she told him about imaginary numbers.