The Darkest Road

Warning(s): AU ('What If?'-ending to GoF), torture, mindfuck, horror, references to non-con and chan

Note: B-day ficlet for the lovely Anne Phoenix! Thanks to viverra_libro and Liriaen for whipping it into shape. The title has been filched from Guy Gavriel Kay's novel.

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The boy had broken a long time ago.

It hadn't taken much, or long, to achieve after I'd picked him up from among the headstones of the graveyard where a lucky Stunning spell had put an end to his spirited escape. Two days, perhaps three.

It was the Cruciatus that did it, or maybe the rapes. Not the first one certainly, not young Bartemius having him flung face-down over the Riddles' vast dining room table. He'd whimpered, yes, with blood dripping from gnawed lips, face twisted in pain and heels kicking for his torturer's shins. But no, not that. Perhaps later, Walden's cock and whips and axe handle, or Lucius's infinitely more subtle torments. But most likely the Cruciatus, which had wrung screams from that scrawny body that had rung through the mildewing house for hours; their echoes still linger in dark corners, or ghost around dusty curtains.

He hardly ever screams now. He sobs in wet gasps, face pinched as if, although pain is everywhere, his own suffering still puzzles him. Perhaps what has silenced his stubborn rage were the memories he'd seen when we hurled him into Lucius' Pensieve: the confrontation between his blood-traitor godfather, paranoidly sniffing around his old enemies for information about little Harry's whereabouts, and the Malfoys. He'd been forced to watch the double Evisceration Curse Crabbe and Goyle threw from the sidelines, leaving Black in a pool of his own blood, clutching at his entrails and howling like the cur he was. Even though his comrade, Lupin, whisked him away in a risky bit of localised Apparition, Black hasn't been seen since. Perhaps he is dead, or Dumbledore has finally decided to leash him. It was, however, the first night I've heard the brat shed voluntary tears of pure misery against the flagstones, instead of having them dragged out of him by force.

I stare down at the dark head at my feet, at hair so soft it is tempting to run my fingers through it over and over. Hair, a fragile skull under thin skin, and an endlessly entertaining mind beneath. I've sifted through that brain for months now; there is hardly a memory left unturned and unuprooted. By now his defences, born from mere feeble obstinacy, have faded entirely. I don't require Legilimency any longer; there is a part of me inside that child, rolling up to the surface of his brain like a dog at the sight of its master whenever I approach it.

When at first the boy's mind tried to flee from my grasp, I allowed him free passage into my own head. He, too, finds the pathways open when he's so close, just within perfect reach where he's chained to my throne, lying at my feet. He stumbled through the stone labyrinth of my memory, groping for doors whose jagged metal handles cut his vulnerable flesh, only to fall as they vanish, into the clutch of horrors beyond. Kneeling on imaginary ground, eyes wide with horror and hands pressed over his ears to shut out Dorcas Meadowes's screams as she writhes under my Cruciatus. Shaking in terror as he watches a Muggle fetch a carving knife from his own kitchen counter under Imperius, then amble towards his petrified, wide-eyed children. He suffers most of all from watching others suffer and die. Though he experienced enough horrors himself as well; his soul is open to me, and twisting memories into nightmares is such creative entertainment.

I pull his infant recollections of me to the surface: the deaths of his parents, screaming, begging for his life; an image of myself, looming over his crib while his scared green eyes squint up at me under an unscarred forehead. Me pulling away his blankets to reveal a smooth, round tummy; Nagini coiling inside the wicker crib, around his hip, in a loose loop around the fat little throat. Until she rears up, dripping poison that burns the soft baby skin, and strikes at his chest, biting deep until her tongue licks at his heart and he drowns in blood and shrieks.

Taking him into the cave in place of Dennis and Amy, among stones slick with algae, sand and puddles of icy sea-water. When I'm lifting him over some of the larger rocks his feet are too small to reach, the fine-boned fingers tremble in my younger self's hand. Leaving him at the lake in the half-dark of the cave, thoughtlessly stirring the black waters with his fingers, and with it stirring the pale, macerated bodies below to their semblance of life. They creep onto the shore like all those years ago when they trapped the screaming children in front of young Tom's fascinated eyes, pressing close, trailing decomposing, slimy fingers over smooth cheeks. The boy doesn't scream yet, although his chest flutters in terror and small, breathless whines escape his mouth, pressed shut as it is against the caresses of the Inferi. I only need to alter the scene a little, until they trap his flailing limbs on the ground, peel him out of his clothes and press dead fingers over – and into – every crevice of his body. He screams then, high and shrill and with eyes rolled back into his head until they're almost as white as the Inferi's. Until the fingers creep into his mouth, and stifle his wails to a gurgle.

It is this moment which breaks the last vestiges of resistance in his body and mind in a wave of putrid violation that drives him to the very brink of madness. Strange how it's always the archetypes that do the most damage: the monsters under the crib, the dead from the water. But I feel his mind cracking, and pull back. One day soon, I will gain full understanding of that infernal prophecy my Severus brought me pieces of so many years ago, and then I'll be able to release the boy into death. But until then, he may still be useful with his mind clinging, however feebly, to a thread of sanity.

He flinches away from my hand for weeks afterwards, even as he presses himself to my legs for warmth, maybe comfort. The slight, solid body close to mine is pleasant, as is the utter abasement of an enemy entirely at my mercy. It is near death, that body. Every day, Wormtail waters and cleans him in the mornings when I'm receiving my followers and devising my strategies in the upper rooms of the Riddles' dilapidated manor. I refuse to be surrounded by stink or filth.

But he isn't being fed unless one of my own takes pity, and pity is scarce on the ground among Death Eaters. He takes crumbs of bread from Wormtail's fingers as daintily as he takes cocoa-dusted sweets from Lucius', knowing they will be filled with potions that will burn his mouth and throat and will leave him writhing in lust or pain or both, for hours on end. He survives on healing charms and the thick, cloyingly sweet potions Severus brews for this occasion. It is a half-life at best; he could not now be restored to full health again even if he should be rescued.

Severus provides his doses unfailingly even if he scowls with resentment, and they force back colour into the boy's face and restore some taut vigour to his deathly pale skin. For a while. He's invited to partake of the child like a number of others, my Severus, after proving his loyalty a little belatedly, but he never makes use of Potter's body. Oh, he binds the boy over a table and whips his back – and front – until blood drips and the gasps and whimpers are loud in the air, but every time I watch him, I permit myself a sharp, secret smile. No matter how cruelly he strikes, he will not manage to achieve his heart's desire: to whip the child's body into that other, similar one he wants to hurt: the one that has been consumed by worms a long time ago.

After my initial thirst for vengeance was indulged in and sated, I couldn't keep ignoring how the boy's cheap little childhood reflected my own like a scratched mirror. Only that this child never fought back, but let itself be made victim by those disgusting Muggles. And Albus Dumbledore choose this weak, passive wraith over me as his champion, and turned Hogwarts into a refuge for this while refusing me? Only now that I can knead the boy's soul under my hands do I realise the extent of foolishness in the old man's choices.

It is the child's utter helplessness, past and present, that reconciles me to keeping him alive as Severus has advised me. For the sake of the prophecy, but even more so because after searching through his miserable self, tugging at the gifts that are his only because I touched him as an infant, I realise that he is not, nor will he ever be, a danger to me. A diversion to be toyed with, nothing more; a soft cheek against my knee, light breaths betraying his presence with the hitch of a nightmare, dark hair under my fingertips, translucent skin. Nothing but a jumble of memories and a slight, unobtrusive presence in my mind which I leave open to him more and more often. He'll be dead soon; it doesn't matter.

I see him leaning against a tree as I recall standing in the Forbidden Forest, conversing with the centaur Bane on the inevitability of fate; find him crouching in a nook of Marvolo Gaunt's kitchen like an echo of my mother's ghost as I search through Morfin's mind while clutching Salazar Slytherin's ring till my fingers bleed. See him, a wide-eyed sylph among the stuffed rooms of Hepzibah Smith's house, gawking at gaudy trinkets like the ignorant half-Muggle he is, blind to the true treasures. I wonder what his half-damaged brain makes of what he observes.

I've grown possessive of the frail child that shadows my memories. I caught myself healing his torn insides and the bleeding gashes Macnair's whip had left on his torso, and holding the cool little body on my lap until the tension left his limbs, inch by inch, and his head rested beneath my chin while his ragged breaths quieted to soft snuffles against the front of my robes. I sent away young Bartemius when he came to claim his afternoon's diversion and Legilimency revealed his mind swamped green with jealousy for the boy at my feet, and the razors tucked away in his belt. Sent my most loyal follower on a meaningless errand that had to radiate my displeasure in favour of leaving the boy curled at my feet like one of Nagini's brood, asleep in peace.

Indulgence had gone too far that day; he learned that lesson abandoned into Severus's hands the following night, from where he returned, clear-eyed but glistening with sweat and blood, his muscles bunched in pain, to seek safety with his face pressed against my calf. I did offer him refuge from his wounds in my mind then, leaving him in an imaginary apple-grove I once rested in while travelling the lengths of Romania after my schooldays. The beams of a decades-old sun warm his face while my conscious mind busies itself with outlining the liberation of my followers from Azkaban.

I don't begrudge Harry those moments of peace any longer; he has paid his dues, accepted me as the centre of his world and the only master and protector he'll ever have now. And on a day not to far in the future, he will die and I'll rise to glory over the ashes of the past.

I stroke a strand of black hair back behind his ear while my mind's eye observes him in the grove, sleeping in sunlit grass among scattered apples. One day soon, although I don't find myself impatient for it to arrive; he is no burden, and careful planning and subtle moves are the order of the day. Victory is certain, and Harry and I – we can wait.

~ finis ~