Anima Concordia

Chapter I

One second he was sleeping, though not peacefully, his dreams filled with screams and blurred figures, either beating him or launching in disturbing and humiliating way on his unclothed form, causing pain and nausea and gut-wrenching shame in him. The next second he, not even fully awake yet, launched himself on the intruder he felt appearing in his bedroom - in his bed - with his wand out and at the throat of the stranger in an instant. He went for the stranger's collar, only to find it absent, as were the rest of his clothes. He pressed his wand more fiercely at the person's throat, his eyes widening in surprise, meeting with the familiar bright-green ones, just as they, too, had widen in shock.

The other just uttered his name and the next second he was leaning, no falling forward and onto him, toppling them both over the edge of the bed and onto the floor.

For several long moments he was just laying there, trying to comprehend what had just happened.

His house was thoroughly and heavily warded. So much so, that even his most trusted people could not enter or perceive its location. He held his meetings with them elsewhere, always leaving only after he was certain, that none of them were following, and even then he never directly Apparated here, all the time jumping to random locations first, and then coming to the village several miles away by the untraceable Portkey and walking here on foot. Yes, he was paranoid, but that was sensible paranoia, with him being the most feared, but at the same time the most wanted criminal of their world.

And now this -

Potter in his house, in his clutches, helpless and unconscious. With Potter's state of absolute undress it was pretty obvious, that he was not bearing his wand. Although, knowing the so-called Light side, they may have taught him wandless magic, he thought.

Or not.

The boy was in no shape for fighting, he realized, finally getting up from the floor, while still holding the unmoving and thoroughly beaten naked form in his arms. It looked like Potter had gone through something very similar to the events from his own dream: the brat was covered in bruises and cuts all over his body, which was too light for the boy his age. And the blood -

He spelled the lights on, putting the Potter's body onto the bed and looking him over. For some reason unbeknownst to him such amount of thick half-dried blood, covering the body on the bed, made him feel -

Strange, that was the right word for it, as he couldn't dare to acknowledge that the view in front of him made him angry at whoever did this, and that his feeling of vulnerability had nothing to do with someone breaching his wards, but everything to do with his obsession with the boy.

Potter was his - either to bring him pain, or to relive him from it - and where did that thought came from, he didn't want to know, but, anyway, Potter was his. Full stop.

And maybe there was something else in there, powering his sense of vulnerability, some very real, magical and very out-of-place feeling, drawing him to the still form on the bed, nagging at the back of his mind, trying to tell him something. Something important, very probably -

But he now had more pressing matter at his hands.

Potter was still bleeding, red wetness soaking the sheets under him, and the spot, which was growing bigger the quickest and very steadily, at that, was the dark-red pool between boy's slightly parted thighs. That disturbed him a bit more than the fact, that the tip of his own wand, which just recently was pressed to the boy's throat, was covered in blood, too. He could not cut the boy so deep, that cut should have been there even before that. And that cut worried him, too.

Beside these two alarming injures, he could make out several broken ribs, wrongly bent ankle, swollen wrist and - he managed to turn the boy onto his side to look at his behind - several long and deep gashes decorated his backside, their site reminding him of his own long-forgotten teen age and spankings he was quite often subjected to at the orphanage he lived in his summers.

He cursed loudly and bit his lip, blinking surprisingly.

Did he just - ? He almost never swore, rarely even raised his voice, and only at his most stupid of followers, preferring to hiss instead, as that made them tremble and cover in fear more successfully. Usually, the more angry he got the quieter he became. It was more fitting. He never really understood the necessity of angry shouting at imbeciles, as the shouts seemed to numb their meager brains to mushy nothingness completely. On the contrary, if one needed to strain his ears to hear the order, the possibility of this order sinking in his brain proper became higher, as well as the probability of this order seen through to its completeness.

Shaking his head, he pointed his wand at the body before him, casting several diagnostics spells, some of his own invention, as he never fully trusted anyone with his own health. Then he performed couple of the more mild healing spells, fixing the least serious of boy's injuries.

All the while, he tried really hard not to dwell on his own actions, not to think that he should be just glad and thankful to whomever fulfilled his task for him, making his ultimate enemy suffer and bringing him closer to death, than he, Voldemort, had ever managed to. Scoffing at the thought, as he was unsuccessful in pushing these musings out of his mind, no matter, how hard he tried, Tom, or rather Voldemort, continued his spellwork, carefully charming away Harry Potter's bruises and wounds.

He will think on it tomorrow, as the famous saying goes. For now he was content to just take care of the boy on his bed and grab some sleep, if the time permits after his task has been finished.