Chapter Text
“Huh? Black? Sirius Orion Black.” Barty sticks his head through the railing.
His long nails scratch at the soft skin of his neck. “Fuck—you…” His voice cracks. “You really do look nothing like him.”
The man in the cell across from him is hunched over, grime ground into his skin like he’s grown from the stone itself.
It sends a sharp jolt down Barty’s spine. Not pain, not exactly—something worse. Something deep, something twisted, a wire tightening at the base of his gut and pulling. Everything in him recoils.
Because the man in front of him is wrong.
Because Sirius looks off, doesn’t look like him at all.
Barty stares.
“You got nothing to say?” he hisses.
Sirius lifts his head and Barty’s hand starts working again—scratching, clawing.
Because he’s all wrong. His eyes are a different colour. His eyes are cruel—not pathetic and sad.
“I hope my brother and your friends died as nobly as James.”
Barty tugs at his hair. Hard. A tuft comes loose.
“Brother,” he spits. “Blood traitor brothers. Funny that.”
He yanks harder. A hiss of breath between his teeth.
“He’s not your brother—he was mine.”
Sirius looks away.
“Mine. Not yours. Mine,” Barty mutters, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth. There’s spit—always spit now—and it glistens on his chin.
“You—he didn’t, and you—you had his blood,” he says. “You wasted it.”
He presses his forehead to the bars and breathes through his teeth.
“He was mine.”
A beat.
Barty thinks of nervous dogs and the words that died on his tongue.
...
“I fucked him, you know.”
Sirius looks at him. And Barty smiles. It feels wrong on his face.
“Yeah,” he says, wetting his lips. “Yeah, I did. He loved it.” His voice twists sharp as wire. “Let me touch what you never even saw. I knew Regulus Black—better than you ever could.”
Silence.
“And yet,” Sirius says, “he still died kneeling for your Lord. Like a lamb.”
A pause.
“Tell me—did he cry?”
The world stalls.
Then it hits.
Barty’s vision whites out at the edges. Something hot builds inside him, rises fast—too fast—until it tears through him like fire up a chimney.
He lunges at the bars, voice shredded. “I’m gonna fucking—”
The sound breaks. Words unravel into nothing but a scream. Metal rattles beneath his hands. He shakes the bars so hard his shoulders burn.
Down the corridor, Bellatrix shrieks with laughter. “Kill—I’m—I’m going to fucking kill—“
Sirius just stares.
Barty shoves his fingers through the space between the bars, clawing at air.
“I’m going to kill you! Do you hear me!? I’m gonna—”