Chapter Text
Chapter 1 - You Won't Feast On Sick Lambs
"What is this?"
The masked men flinched beneath their Master's screams. When his voice finally broke off, only the slap of his bare feet against the beaten earth resonated through the graveyard, punctuated somewhere by the boy's muffled whimpers.
"What is this?" he bellowed again. "What do you expect me to do with this?" He pointed at the boy pinned against the statue at the centre of the necropolis, choking under the curse that held his limbs locked.
Voldemort tore the mask from one of his men.
"Severus!" he called out, unmasking several of those within reach, each lowering their head dutifully. "Where is Severus?" he shrieked, increasingly frantic. "Severus!"
"He is not with us," a man said in the fourth row.
Voldemort stopped, his red eyes glinted with fury.
"Step forward," he hissed.
His long, deathly pale hands seized the man who moved too slowly for his liking, ripped off his mask, and a crude smile twisted his whitish face.
"Well, well... Lucius," he murmured, grabbing the wizard by the collar. "Have you done me the honour of joining us on this grand evening?"
The man opened his mouth, then shut it again, his eyes wide with fear.
"It is an honour for me to be here tonight," Lucius managed.
Voldemort shoved him back with such force that he toppled, scrambled to his feet, and returned to the others.
"Bring me Severus!" Voldemort roared, resuming his pacing, exasperated.
Several men nodded and disapparated.
"My Lord," Pettigrew squeaked, "but it is Harry Potter..."
With a burst of fury, Voldemort seized his ungrateful follower and hurled him against a tomb.
"Vermin," Voldemort hissed, his bloodshot eyes ablaze. "Pitiful, brainless wretch. Do you think I am stupid?"
A flash of green burst from his wand. Then came a dreadful silence.
Harry was still trying to breathe, struggling in vain to free himself, to crawl toward Cedric's body and the Portkey. Voldemort approached and sat on a nearby grave, arms dangling over his knees, almost weary. He watched the boy's feeble contortions in silence, and his expression grew more furious by the second. Being watched like that, studied, assessed and found wanting, was worse than the curse holding him in place. Harry could no longer hold back his tears, at first from terror, then, slowly, from shame.
Suddenly, Voldemort sprang to his feet with a growl of frustration. Some men Apparated near the large cauldron, and one of them bowed as the Dark Lord neared.
"My Lord."
Voldemort ripped off his mask to reveal Severus's face beneath.
"Severus. What a pleasure to see you again," he hissed in a voice laced with menace.
"It is a great honour to be with you this evening..."
"Then perhaps you could enlighten me as to what exactly we are watching squirm like a common worm," he cut in, in a syrupy tone, pointing to the young Gryffindor. "Come closer."
Severus stepped forward, stiff and hesitating. Harry's cheeks were streaked with tears that had cut through the dried mud. His robes were torn in several places, and a deep wound on his forearm bled freely. He looked up at his professor with pleading eyes, hatred had given way to confusion.
"I am sorry, my Lord," Severus said calmly, "but all I see in front of us is Harry Potter."
Voldemort flung his arms out with another scream of irritation and turned towards his followers once more.
"So this is it?" he howled. "Dumbledore's great champion? A terrified child? What are you? Ten? Hmm?” he demanded, turning back to Harry. "A toddler! And what do you expect me to do now? Cry victory after slaughtering a weak and defenceless child?"
"You didn't manage it the first time," Harry rasped, "and I was just a baby."
Severus turned to the boy. Voldemort laughed, a loud, high-pitched, terrifying laugh, then roared again like a beast.
"This is disgraceful! Where is the grandeur in such a deed?" he thundered, pacing once more, his bare feet slapping the beaten earth of the cemetery paths. "I cannot kill that and call it triumph!"
Severus looked back at Harry, his face betraying nothing of what brewed within him.
Voldemort halted. He turned once more to the boy, then let his gaze drift to the lifeless body of the student in yellow, lying a few feet away.
"Severus," he hissed. "You will return this boy's body to his kin."
The Potions Master nodded curtly, then advanced slowly towards Cedric's corpse. For a moment, he remained motionless, looming over the still figure. His throat tightened at the sight of the boy's frozen face.
In life, Cedric had barely caught his attention, a student of quiet manners, average marks, and little consequence. But torn from the modest shell of his existence, he had become a martyr, not through heroism, but by the sheer misfortune of standing too near a war that should never have touched him. He had been meant for a gentle life stitched with small joys. An ordinary existence.
Now, all of it lay unraveled in the stillness at his feet. And Severus, witness to this absurd end, became the bearer of this message to those who had surrounded the boy in his quiet normality, charged with returning what remained of someone too ordinary to deserve such a fate.
He took a deep breath and seized the stiff body.
Voldemort stepped toward Harry once more and stared at him one last time with visible disgust.
"And you," he said, closing a cold hand around the boy's wrist, "are coming with me."