Crouch paused as he reached the door labeled ‘Hailey’s Office’, and took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure exactly why she had scheduled the week of detention she’d given him for commenting on her bra two full weeks after the event, but he was grateful for it; during that time, he had managed to locate her office. So, he wasn’t entirely doomed- but he was close. According to the clock on the door, his detention started a mere two minutes after he’d arrived.
He took another quick swig of his Polyjuice Potion, then knocked sharply.
“Come in,” Hailey’s voice called.
So, he pushed the door open.
The first thing he saw… was the large, muggle device sitting next to one of the tables placed against the far wall, behind Hailey’s desk, and the odd plastic things that were actually sitting on her desk, at the corner in front of her. She was positioned so she could easily look past them towards the door.
“Ahh, you’re here,” Hailey observed, then tapped something on the bumpy plastic thing lying on the desk in front of her a couple times. The thing behind her immediately started making noise, and started spewing pages out, one after another. “Now that you’re here, we can get started,” she told him calmly, placing a small wooden trough on her desk between them. “You’re going to start by putting your wand on this.”
He glared at it, then sighed, drew his wand as he clunked his way over, and placed it wordlessly on the trough.
She nodded calmly. “Alright. Then, you’re going to take this pen,” she plucked a small red plastic rod from a cup full of blue ones and clicked it, “and fill these out, at that desk by the door.” She took the deck of papers off of the thing behind her, which had stopped spitting pages out, flipped through them quickly, and nodded. “Yup, that’s all of them.” She handed the plastic rod and the papers to him. “You won’t be needing ink, just write with the pointy end.”
He accepted the papers and plastic rod- pen, had she called it?- and sighed.
“As you can see, I’ve filled in the first one for you. Copy that on every numbered line, then bring it back to me. I will check it, then return your wand and dismiss you.”
He glared at her for a second. Interestingly, his magic eye couldn’t see through the big panel things she was looking at- but it could see through her robes.
“And another nice one,” he muttered, under his breath, as he headed back towards the desk next to the door- which was completely empty.
“That’s another week,” Hailey told him calmly, though there was venom in her voice.
He winced, sat down clumsily, and read the line he was to be copying.
I must not look through clothes.
He stared at it. It was very short… and exactly what he had just violated.
Finally, he sighed, raised the ‘pen’, and looked at it.
Yes, it was muggle technology- it must hold its own ink inside.
He put it to the page after the one, on the first line, and wrote.
I must not look through clothes. The pen used bright, ruby-red ink. It was going to be a tall order to keep his magic eye off other people’s clothes; that was how he entertained himself most of the time: By looking through all the girls’ clothes.
He let out a gasp and dropped the pen as a gash appeared, briefly, on the back of his hand, spelling out those same words. A blood quill? But blood quills were-! He paused, staring at the pen. Had she made her own? A blood pen?”
“Problem?”
He turned at the unfamiliar voice… to see the little girl that had so easily captured and bitten his Killing Curse leaning out from behind another set of those panel things, where she’d been completely hidden from him up until then.
A shiver ran down his spine, then he turned resolutely back towards the papers. “No,” he barked, lifted the pen again and, gritting his teeth, put it back to the page.
As he worked, resisting the pain on the back of his hand, he used his magic eye to look through the pages, all the way to the last page. The lines stopped halfway down it, at one thousand seventy two.
Then, careful to hold his tongue, he turned the eye to peer back at Hailey.
… There was a note pinned under the waistband of her skirt, reading ‘That’s a third week, Moody’.
“Well?” Hailey asked coldly, looking at him.
He flinched, and turned the eye resolutely down to the pages again.
Without the stolen wand, Crouch had no way of making sure his Polyjuice Potion was appropriately timed- so, whenever it felt like it was getting close to an hour, he took a sip of it.
While he was scribbling on line seven hundred ninety-two, he glanced back with his magical eye, hoping that maybe this time, she wouldn’t notice.
There was a note held to the side of her bra by a safety pin, reading ‘And a fourth week’.
Hailey gave him a look. A look that told him she knew he was looking.
He winced, took another sip of his potion… and drew air for part of it.
He froze, eyes wide, and tested the flask again. Yes, it was now empty. He had run out of potion.
“Problem?” Hailey’s voice called.
“Er-!” He turned to look at her, focusing the magical eye on the grain in the table under the pages. “Ran out of water,” he rumbled. “Can I-?” He leaned forward, as if to rise.
“No,” Hailey told him, “you may not run off in the middle of your detention.” Then, she smiled. “If you work at it, though, you shouldn’t have any trouble finishing the rest of those in a single hour.”
“You’re evil, you know that?” the smaller girl said admiringly, from behind her panels.
“I do,” Hailey agreed, turning back to her own.
Crouch turned back to the pages, took a deep breath, and applied the pen to them once again.
He was going to finish, and get out, in time to keep his transformation from falling off.
He resisted the temptation to look through her clothes again, and instead concentrated the magic eye on the texture of his shoe.
Crouch started to get edgy right about the time he was working on nine hundred eighty-three. He started casting his magical eye around, searching for a clock- any clock- in the visible portion of the Castle… while resolutely not looking through Hailey’s clothes. For some reason, the one on the outside of her office door seemed to have disappeared.
“Twenty-seven minutes,” Hailey supplied calmly, without looking up.
He froze. Was that how long it had been? Or how long he had left? Or completely unrelated?
He shivered, and kept working.
It happened again on line one thousand fifty-four.
“Eleven minutes,” Hailey told him, again without looking up.
Finally, he was done. He scrawled the very last ‘s’... then took a deep breath, and let it out, glancing at the back of his hand. It was red and raw, but nothing was showing.
As it wouldn’t. It took a lot of work with a blood quill to induce scarring.
He stacked up the pages, and rose from the table, taking the pen with him as he walked, unprompted, up to Hailey’s desk to hold them out to her.
Hailey accepted them calmly, swiveling and sliding her chair over. She clicked the pen and dropped it back into the cup, then rifled slowly through the pages, one by one. Finally, she nodded. “Alright,” she muttered, and pushed the trough- which still carried the wand- towards him.
Then, she looked up at him through her eyelashes.
“One minute, thirty seconds.” She put the pages down and, as he accepted his wand and left, turned back to her panels.
“You’re really evil,” her friend observed, as he was opening the door to leave.
Hailey chuckled- and the last sentence he heard before the door landed closed was “Thanks, I try to be.”
He rushed as quickly as he could, without looking like he was rushing, back to his office.
And sure enough, right about a minute and a half after Hailey had said that so ominously, he felt the transformation begin to reverse.
He quickly let himself into his office, caught the wooden leg before it could fall on the floor, closed and locked the door, and looked around the room.
Finally, after a deep, calming breath, he set about preparing the next day’s Polyjuice Potion. It was already past ten, so the likelihood of a visitor was quite low.
“Welcome back, Professor,” Hailey greeted, when Crouch arrived for the second detention. She pushed a small plastic tray towards him as he approached his desk. “Wand, please, and the magic eye in the glass too.”
He stared at her.
She calmly matched his gaze. “Unless you would prefer to be fired.”
He sighed, placed his wand on the wooden tray… then removed the magic eye and gingerly dropped it into the glass of water.
Then he gasped as it instantly went blind.
Hailey stared him down, holding out another sheaf of papers, which she clicked the red pen over before dropping it on top of them.
He sighed, and accepted them. If she was going to torture him with his detentions, then she would torture him. There wasn’t much he could do about it, either- Dumbledore was already siding with her, so he wouldn’t help him. He walked calmly to the desk in the corner, sat down, took a swig of his potion, and started working. Perhaps he would have enough if he timed them every two hundred lines? Or every three hundred? The day before, when he’d gotten his wand back, it had been to find out it had been almost exactly three hours.
Two hundred and fifty, he decided.
“One minute,” Hailey muttered.
Crouch flinched- then rechecked his line number.
He was on line three hundred and twenty seven- he’d missed two hundred and fifty.
So, silently thanking the Gods that she was paying better attention than he, he lifted his flask and took a swig from it.
Then he jumped when someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Hailey called.
Someone entered. It was a girl, and her hair looked like a waterfall, when he glimpsed it in the corner of his eye. “Hi Hailey,” she greeted cheerfully.
“Good evening, Padma,” Hailey answered- and Crouch heard her rising from her seat. “You ready?”
“Yup,” the new girl- Padma, apparently- said. “Um, what’s he doing here?”
“He’s serving in detention,” Hailey told her.
“Detention?” she asked- and he felt her lean over him from behind to peer at the parchment for a moment. “You’re having him use your Blood Pen?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What did he do?”
“You saw what he was writing, right?”
“Yeah, ‘I must-’!”
There was silence for a couple seconds.
“Oh My,” Padma muttered.
“Yes,” Hailey stated flatly.
“Are you sure that’s going to be enough?”
Hailey laughed. “If I gave him any more, I’d quickly run out of days with which to punish him for further infractions,” she told her. “And besides, I have a plan. Anyways, the Granger Warp- let’s see how you’re doing on that. If you’re good, I can teach you something interesting.”
“Interesting?” Padma asked curiously.
“Yes,” Hailey answered slyly. “Interesting.”
Crouch scowled, listening with half an ear as he continued to endlessly scrawl line after line. He remembered to take a swig when he hit six hundred, while they talked, studied, and practiced something related to the ‘gabbleblotchits’ and the ‘gruntbuggly’. There was even a mention of the ‘micturations’!
When he was on nine hundred eighty-three, Hailey glanced over. “Four seconds,” she called, before turning straight back to Padma.
He, in a flash of fear, quickly took a sip of his potion. Somehow, Hailey seemed to know about it… and wasn’t letting it on?
She was definitely suspicious. Had the Dark Lord planted her too?
“Anyways,” Hailey continued, back with Padma. “What do you think it does?”
There was a moment of silence. The anti-bleeding charm Crouch had cast on his hand was working well; he knew blood quills couldn’t be protected against while still letting them even have the appearance of functioning properly without an active wand, but standing spells like that would stem the excess bleeding, even while the cut was open.
“Y-You’re kidding me,” Padma gasped.
Hailey chuckled softly.
“Does it really?” Padma asked, sounding excited.
“Yes,” Hailey answered smugly. “Works perfectly.”
Padma burst into laughter.
She was still laughing when Crouch finished one thousand seven, the last one on today’s papers, and looked up.
Hailey stepped over, accepted the stack, inspected it, and nodded, before striding over behind her desk to put the pen away and offer him his wand and eye back. “Alright,” she told him. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She smiled. “Forty-three minutes,” she told him, as he accepted his wand.
He immediately started his timing spell on that time remaining- then put his magic eye in and, as he did every morning, made sure it was working by looking through someone’s clothes… Hailey’s, this time.
She didn’t seem to be wearing any underclothes today. Instead, her body looked to have been crafted out of solid wood, with the words ‘Really, Moody?’ carved into it.
“That’s another week,” Hailey told him calmly.
He flinched away from her, turned, and headed for the door.
“You’re evil, you know that?” Padma told Hailey.
“I’ve heard,” Hailey answered cheerfully- and, when he glanced back with the magical eye, he saw them high-five one another.
Padma didn’t seem to have a body inside her clothes. It was simply… gone.
“Yeek!” Padma gasped, giving a shudder. “Is- Is that what it-?”
“It is,” Hailey answered, right as he left the room. “Moody,” she called calmly.
He stopped, a second away from closing the door, to turn back towards her.
“Another week,” she told him.
He very nearly broke into a run as he fled. That girl wasn’t just suspicious. No; she went straight through scary, and right to downright dangerous. Far more even than the Dark Lord- there was no way she was his underling.
Yet, she commanded an almost ridiculous amount of authority, so he’d have to play his part… or else.
Part of him honestly wondered if the Dark Lord Voldemort would be afraid or not when he told him of her. Or worse, when they eventually ended up face-to-face, because they would, eventually.