Harry Potter And The Breeding Darkness

Chapter 4

Days began to pass quickly for Harry at Riddle Manor. The morning after the day Mixey brought him his first batch of letters, which was July 10th, the Daily Prophet announced that retired Auror, Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody, was found dead in his home from a suspected heart attack. Harry knew that the last few weeks of the man's life were spent in a catatonic healing coma to try to remove all the signs that he had suffered from torture and malnourishment for the greater part of the last year. Then he was fed a potion that Snape brewed that recreated the effects of a severely ailing heart. Once the potion was entirely out of his system, he was taken to his own house and Barty had delivered the finishing spell that ended the poor sod's miserable life.

The whole thing was played out to a precise degree to make everything look as authentic as possible. Even the most advanced of magical autopsies would confirm the story that the man had died naturally, and remove any doubt that foul play could have been involved in the man's death. It was imperative that everyone honestly believed that Moody really had died of natural causes. If it was ever discovered that the Moody who had been teaching at Hogwarts wasn't really Moody, it could cause a lot of potential problems.

Harry had started attending all of the meetings with Tom. The day after the letters arrived, he had stayed in the library for a portion of the early morning meeting but halfway through, found himself so antsy and twitchy that he wasn't getting anything accomplished. He also found that he was experiencing a sort of echo of his anxiety, which really only made it harder to ignore, but couldn't fathom what could be the reasoning behind that. And then Mixey had appeared in his room, saying that Master had insisted that Master Evan come to the meeting in the conference room. Harry had jumped out of his seat and bolted down the stairs. He was barely able to get a hold of himself in time to enter the conference room with some dignity. He hadn't even realized, until then, that the biggest cause of his anxiousness had been his distance from Tom. But once he was in the room with the Dark Lord, he suddenly found his nerves relaxed and calm again.

Afterwards the two had done a little experimenting with the occurrence, at Tom's insistence. He had told Harry that he refused to be controlled by whatever this was without understanding it. They had tried staying at opposite ends of the manor for prolonged periods of time to see just how long they could be away from each before it became distracting.

It didn't take long.

In fact, they found that the longer they tried to remain separate from each other, the more powerful the desire to come together intimatelyafterwards was. The evening of the 11th, Tom had stayed in his potions lab in the basement while Harry stayed at his desk in their bedroom on the 3rd floor, for three solid hours because of Tom's stubborn insistence, and him having two of the house elves stay outside of the bedroom door to make sure Harry didn't go racing out of it.

In the end, it had been Tom who had gone up to the third floor where he promptly dismissed the elves and practically attacked Harry against the wall - which Harry had more than enthusiastically welcomed. Tom had ended up bending Harry over his desk, grabbed a fierce hold on Harry's hair, arching him back, while he gripped hold of Harry's hip with his other hand. He had then spent nearly a half hour thrusting into the extraordinarily eager, responsive, and surprisingly vocal, younger wizard.

It had been rough and unexpected, but it had been exactly what Harry had wanted. Afterwards Tom had taken him to the bed and caressed him with surprising gentleness, and Harry could tell the man was worried that he'd gone too far, or that he had hurt him. Harry fell asleep, wrapped around Tom while the elder wizard slowly carded his fingers through Harry's hair.

Harry woke up later, around 3am, to find a tightness in his chest and no one beside him in bed. He had climbed out of bed and followed Tom's magic to the library where he found the older wizard sitting on the floor, surrounded by a pile of books.