Tom leaned back, his eyes half-lidded as he watched Burke carefully negotiate with the flustered man who claimed to have information on Dumbledore. As far as Tom could work out, most of it was information they already possessed and had flushed out into the world, but there might be a few kernels of new facts there.
Perhaps not worth paying for, Tom thought, and looked around in distaste. They had met their supposed witness in front of a small house deep in the Welsh hills. The landscape was pretty enough, Tom supposed, but what he mainly saw was the dirty state of the house’s roof and front door, and how steep the ground around it was. You would have a hard time maneuvering an army here.
“And then he said that he wanted to eradicate all knowledge of Dark Arts from the world…”
Tom’s head snapped around, but not because of the mumbled words. One of the monitoring charms he had cast on Harry was shrieking at him. He stood at once, eyes narrowed, and felt out the careful tangle of invisible threads that tied him to the spell.
“My lord?” someone asked. Tom didn’t care to identify the voice right now. He fell into the half-world that the spell created instead.
Harry was moving, but not as if he was walking. Harry was injured.
Harry was unconscious.
Tom opened his eyes, and Burke, who had been the one to reach out and touch him, stumbled back, his face going as pale as their witness’s white hair. Tom said, “I am required back at Malfoy Manor,” and twisted on the spot. Two other Knights were coming with him, from what he saw before he Disapparated.
They could do that. They were not necessary, however.
Tom appeared right in front of the Manor’s grounds, and at once saw the hole blasted in the front walls. He took off towards it at a run. Behind him came pounding footsteps and panting breaths and shouts of his name. Tom ignored it all. What mattered was that he could see someone still faintly moving in the rubble of the wall, and it wasn’t someone he recognized.
The panicked movements of the man intensified as Tom reached him; he was trying to get to his feet and drag free his robe, caught under a chunk of marble. Tom paralyzed him with a spell that severed his spine. The man gasped and then began to sob, his hands now frantically working at his legs instead of his robe.
“There was a man here,” Tom said. “Green-eyed, black-haired, he would have been shielding. I want to know where you took him.” The man had the mark of the phoenix on his cheek, which made him more likely to know than otherwise.
“I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tom shrugged and leaped into the man’s mind, not taking care to make his invasion painless. He saw the memory in the blazing colors of a recent one. The Order had thrown a magical weapon that ricocheted off Harry’s shield and tore open the wall. Then they had poured in, collected Harry, and Apparated him back to—
The crackling static propelled him out of his prisoner’s mind. Under the Fidelius, Tom realized, and spent a moment standing still, his limbs shuddering with the need for violence.
But there was a way past that, although not a way that he usually used, given that it would leave his victim without a mind. Right now, that was at the bottom of his list of worries.
Tom Levitated the stone pinning the man away from his robe. He immediately tried to get up and let out a whimpering howl when he realized that he couldn’t move his legs.
Tom ignored that. “Shara,” he said, and watched out of the corner of his eye as she snapped to attention. Blood from a scrape covered her chin, but he knew that would only make her more attentive to what he wanted. She had her own need for violence, and the fact that she had lost Harry when she was supposed to be watching over him, leashed in her trembling hands. “Guard me and make sure that no one can disturb me for the next minute.”
Shara nodded. Tom turned to face the wizard on the ground. He stopped thrashing and stared at Tom with widening eyes.
“Legilimens,” Tom hissed in Parseltongue.
In seconds, he was back in the wizard’s mind and confronting that static. Tom reached out and spoke to it in Parseltongue, not English. “Let me inside.”
The secret’s magic swirled around him, as loud as Muggle drills in his head. It didn’t matter. Tom ripped effortlessly through the barriers, protected as they were by soul magic and a secret originally spoken in English. Snakes had no souls, and Parseltongue was an older language than English.
Then he was within the secret, reading it out of the crumbling, flaking remains of his victim’s mind, which resembled a parchment burning up in a fireplace more than they did anything else.
The dungeons of the Order of the Phoenix can be found at the last cottage at the end of Gryffindor Street in Godric’s Hollow.
Tom whirled himself out of the man’s mind and spared only a glance at the face of what was now a drooling idiot. “I know where Harry is. Come with me.”
Shara and Philip immediately stepped forwards, while Abraxas came tearing out of the Manor. His face was unnaturally calm. “I’m the one who worried so much about what my parents would say if someone damaged the Manor that I let Potter go into danger,” he said, when Tom glanced at him. “Please let me come, my lord.”
Tom tilted his head. “You are prepared to make up for your mistake?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Tom finally nodded. “Tell me one thing before we leave. Did they also capture Jonquil Potter?”
Abraxas shook his head. “She didn’t get to the battle in time. But she was making so much noise that I Stunned her and locked her in our cellars.”
Tom chuckled. It was less than he would have given her, but at least she would be out of his way for now. “Then come,” he said, and turned to walk again to the edge of the Apparition wards. His mouth filled with anticipation like a snake’s filling with venom.
He looked forward to taking down the Order of the Phoenix. And he looked forward with the same sort of anticipation to talking to Harry.
*
Harry opened his eyes and then flinched away from the brilliance of the light that tried to stab him through the skull. He looked blearily around the room where he appeared to be held. He was experienced enough with being restrained to already know magical ropes were binding him to a chair.
This looked like a cellar, which immediately reminded Harry of the cellars of Malfoy Manor in his own world where he’d been imprisoned during the war. He breathed slowly through the memory, and then looked at the wall immediately in front of him, which was stone and dirt with a low wooden door set into it.
The door opened as he watched it, and a tall man ducked through. He had scraggly grey hair that hung to his shoulders, and weary eyes that looked as green as Harry’s. On his cheek was a brand in the shape of a rising phoenix.
Harry said nothing. The wizard was the one who sat down in another, conjured chair in front of Harry and shook his head. “I wanted the Order people I sent to capture Tom Gaunt. Who are you?”
Harry still said nothing. There was really nothing he wanted to communicate to this wizard, and it wasn’t like he was going to beg for his life or freedom.
The man spent a minute muttering something under his breath that could have been incantations or just swear words, and then sat up. “Well, I suppose that as long as we have you, you can still tell us something about your lord. Imperio!”
Harry didn’t bother pretending. He didn’t know the kinds of plausible lies that one of Tom’s Knights might be able to make up, not when he didn’t know enough about this world. He shrugged off the curse, and felt it roll down his head like water. The wizard stood up immediately.
“Who are you?”
Harry kept silent. The wizard prowled around Harry. He wore heavy grey robes that barely swayed when he walked. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was so open with his expressions, Harry would have been reminded of Lucius Malfoy.
“You know that you could make things easier for yourself by telling me. You could be a valuable hostage. Or someone we could make an offer to so that you would want to join our side instead of staying with the losing one.”
Harry couldn’t help the snort that slipped out of him. The wizard at once tilted his head, and his eyes seemed to spark. “So you don’t think that we’re going to win the war?”
“I don’t see how you can call it a war,” Harry said, and smiled a little when the man’s face twitched. Harry had learned in Auror training to reveal enough to be intriguing if he was captured, so that whoever held him prisoner would have reason to keep him alive, but to also baffle them with statements that didn’t really matter. It threw them off the scent.
“What do you mean by that?”
Harry stoically sat there, through another attempt to cast the Imperius Curse on him, and then through a charm that made him feel as if his hands and feet had suddenly vanished. He’d encountered that one before, and all he had to do was look down and see that his fingers and toes were still there. The wizard pulled his wand back and spent a moment considering.
“I didn’t really want to do this, because of the likelihood of damaging someone I don’t know, but, well. You’re stubborn, and you’re also acting as if you have more knowledge than you should.” The wizard met his eyes and aimed his wand. “Legilimens!”
Harry waited until he could feel the sleek slide of his enemy’s mind into his own, like a silk-covered knife, and then he channeled magic directly at it. That made his body rebound with pain, and he closed his eyes and bit his lips fiercely.
But the wizard screamed, and when Harry opened his eyes again, the man was slumped back against his chair. His face was green, and he was barely breathing. He slowly sat up, but still didn’t open his eyes.
Harry waited. Finally, he got a muzzy glare and a soft, “It would have been so much easier if you had cooperated.”
“I don’t do easy,” Harry said, and this time he had braced himself for the pain as magical flames ignited along his arms, burning the ropes that held him.
The world scrambled in his sight, and he felt as though he had been battering himself against cage bars. But the wizard stumbled back with his mouth open, and Harry rose to his feet and lashed out with wandless force, at the same time casting a Summoning Charm with as much of his will as he could, calling for his wand to come to him.
He dropped to his knees as the fluctuations in his magic rippled through him. The wizard went flying into the stone wall and banged his head, hard, but he wasn’t unconscious yet. He caught Harry with the edge of a Tickling Charm as Harry tried to move out of the way, and Harry fell to the floor. He heard the sheer whistle of his wand traveling towards him, though, and hoped it managed to get through the barriers in the way.
Harry forced the charm to end with another surge of his will, and fought his way to his knees, only to freeze as he felt the tip of the wand press into the back of his skull.
“You’re stronger than I gave you credit for,” the wizard behind him panted. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to let you go.” His wand moved so that it was right behind Harry’s ear. “A little pain might make you more susceptible to the Imp—”
The stone walls shook, and dust drifted down from the ceiling. Harry could guess that something powerful had just hit the house, or whatever the building above the cellars was.
The wizard’s wand wavered for a moment.
Harry dived forwards and kicked out with his legs behind him at the same moment. The wizard fell, and Harry raced towards the door he’d used to enter the cellars. Surely it couldn’t be locked—
And it wasn’t, and when he opened it and staggered into the sloping corridor beyond it, his hovering wand nearly jabbed him in the eye. Harry snatched it and continued running. His muscles ached and a slow trickle of blood worked its way down his cheek where something that had fallen from the ceiling had caught him across the face, but so what? The point was that he was getting out of here.
The corridor led out into the main room of a cottage where various phoenix-branded people were running around and yelling. Harry ducked through their spells and past several of them, only raising a Shield Charm to defend himself when he absolutely had to. The house shook again, and Harry wondered if some of Tom’s Knights were here and using the same sort of tactics that the Order had used to make a hole in Malfoy Manor.
The door burst open, and Harry had to pause in the face of the cold wind that billowed into the cottage from its direction. He looked up and found himself freezing, his mouth slightly open.
Tom stood there, his cloak swaying around him, uplifted by the force of his magic. His gaze locked on Harry. In seconds, he was sweeping his wand to the side in front of him, and the same wind seemed to pick up Order members and toss them aside like feathers.
Then Tom was making his way to Harry’s side, casting a curse as he went that hit someone behind Harry and made more warm blood coat his side. Tom shook his head impatiently and cast a charm that made Harry splutter as it bound his arms to his sides. Tom scooped him off his feet with a Lightening Charm.
“What the fuck, Tom—”
Tom turned and faced the Order members. His magic reared up behind him, and although Harry had felt more powerful wills, including his own before he had sacrificed part of his strength to hold the portal, he had never felt something this murderous.
The Order members’ heads began to explode. Their brains hurled themselves out of their cracking skulls and splattered themselves against the walls.
Tom’s wand was moving easily along in his hand, pointing at wizard after wizard. His lips moved, too, as easily, in the same incantation that was killing them. Harry stared for a second, and then lunged forwards and butted his head into Tom’s chin as hard as he could.
“Tom, stop!”
Tom didn’t stop, though, until everyone in the room was either dead or had Apparated away. His attack on the house had already destroyed the anti-Apparition wards. He tucked Harry closer to his side and stared into his eyes. “Why did you go outside and try to stop the attackers at the Manor when you could barely use magic?”
Harry swallowed. He kept his head turned away from the sight of the broken wizards on the floor, as cowardly of him as it was. He honestly didn’t want to see what Tom had done to them. “I—I wanted to defend Jonquil, and I wanted to protect Abraxas’s house, and I—”
“Wanted to protect people. I know.” Tom jerked his head at the carnage around them, his eyes burning. “This is what happens when you disobey me, Harry. Are you prepared to put up with it if you get hurt again?”
Harry stared at him. “Are you prepared to put up with the consequence of me leaving you if you get too controlling?”
For an instance, Tom’s arm tightened to the point of suffocation. Then he said, “This is about me saying that you disobeyed me, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” Harry eased back and stood up, and this time, he did make himself face the battlefield, and look into the broken faces of the fallen, and make himself realize that they were dead partially because he had tried to defend Malfoy Manor. “I’m willing to accept that you’ll kill for me, and that it was stupid of me to try and use so much magic when I was in pain. But if you try to make me a slave, then I’ll leave.”
Tom thought about it, cocking his head. Then he nodded. “Fair.”
He might have said something else, but a Stunner blasted past him and hit someone in the chest. Harry glanced over his shoulder and saw Black; then he faced her victim, who was the wizard in grey robes who’d confronted him in the cellar. Apparently he hadn’t been one of Tom’s victims.
“Who is that?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know his name. But he was trying to question me.”
Tom visibly restrained himself. “We need to know more about what they were trying to achieve,” he said, and bound the man with a few strokes of his wand.
“He said something that made me think they were looking for you, and I wasn’t on their list at all,” Harry murmured. “But he was interested in me when I resisted his Imperius Curse and his attempt to break into my mind.”
Tom smiled. It made Harry want to shift himself in front of the bound wizard, but Tom was still holding him and he couldn’t. “He tortured you? How interesting.”
“I didn’t say tortured, Tom—”
“It sounded like it,” Tom said, and nodded to Black. She used a spell to scoop up the wizard and maneuver him outside. Tom followed with his arm still wound firmly around Harry, although it had moved to his waist and not his shoulders this time.
Harry kept quiet. He knew Tom was angry, he knew he was wounded, but he was still going to get in the way of Tom interrogating that one wizard all he could.
There was a difference between killing people in the heat of battle, something Harry had been more than guilty of himself, and torturing someone coldly to death.
And if Tom didn’t see the difference, Harry would see it for him.