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The wards shattered as the door exploded inwards.
“Tom!”
The head of the monster snapped towards the voice and Harry gasped. The face that haunted his nightmares wore a crimson mask that drip-drip-dripped onto a blood slicked floor. Even through his shock and disgust, Harry's instincts took over and he raised his wand.
“Stupify!”
The spell struck true.
Voldemort collapsed.
“Blimey, mate...”
Harry barely heard Ron. Or Kingsley. Or any of the other aurors and veterans (students, they used to be students, just like me...) of the Battle of Hogwarts who had come with Harry to this unplotable, unassuming house of horrors nestled in the middle of suburban America. No one could have guessed Voldemort would flee this far after barely escaping what should have been the final battle between light and dark. It had taken the combined forces of the remains of the Order and the hastily cobbled together Ministry months to track him down.
Months...
And in those months Voldemort had turned this small home into a charnel house.
Blood coated the walls. Pooled on the floors. Corpses, and pieces of corpses, lay in piles strewn about every room. A basement door yawned into ominously calm darkness, beckoning to Harry...
Stairs, slicked with blood, were carefully navigated. And at the bottom...
“Merlin...”
Retching. Quiet curses. Deathly silence.
This was a house of the dead. A house of torture and slaughter, where nothing but the thing laying stunned upstairs could survive—
“Harry! This one's alive!”
Harry snapped out of his horrified daze. Raced towards Hermione's voice.
A man sat in the corner, shackled to a wall.
Everyone exploded into action.
“Are you okay?”
“Can you hear me?”
“What happened?”
“Who are you?”
“How long—”
“Stop! Stop it! He needs healing!”
Wands were raised. Wands were used.
“He looks like he hasn't eaten in weeks.”
“He hasn't.”
“Oh no...”
“What?”
“He's a muggle...”
“Oh no.”
“Do you reckon they all were...?”
“Probably.”
“Who...what...?”
That last voice belonged to the man.
“Can you hear me?”
“You're all right now.”
“Get those shackles off of him!”
“Where is he?”
“It's okay, he can't hurt you anymore.”
“What? No. No!”
“Stop—it's okay! Stop struggling!”
“Guys! Stop crowding him. You're scaring him. Go...go search the rest of the house. There might be more...”
Slowly, everyone left, until only Harry and Hermione were left. And the man. They tried to help him. To get him to calm. To tell him he was safe. But the man barely seemed to see them.
Still, they moved away to speak privately.
“What's wrong with him?”
“I don't know. He...he's probably been here for...a while. Weeks, at least.
“Merlin. That's...he made him watch, didn't he. Voldemort.”
“Harry...”
“That bastard.”
“Harry, it's—”
“We should have found him sooner. We should have—fuck!”
“Harry—”
“We just....sat there talking and doing nothing while Voldemort was. While he was...torturing and slaughtering and...”
“None of us could have predicted this. We all thought he was resting and gathering his forces, not...fleeing the country and...doing all this...”
“...I hate him.”
“I know.”
“I should have killed him.”
“Oh, Harry. No. No you shouldn't have. That's not you.”
“Right now...I wish it was...”
Whatever Hermione may have said was cut off by Ron's panicked shout.
“Where did he go?”
“Who?”
“The guy. The muggle! He's gone!”
“What?”
“Voldemort,” Harry hissed.
“Harry, he's stunned. He won't be moving for—”
But Harry was off. Racing up the stairs, slipping on the blood slicked wood, scrambling and pushing and—
“No!”
The muggle was gone.
And so was Voldemort.
Voldemort came to slowly. The faded edges of awareness, hazy and indistinct, overtook the pitch black nothingness with the speed of molasses. His eyes felt weighted down with all the gold in Gringotts, and it was all he could do to keep himself from succumbing to the sweet siren call of unconsciousness once again.
No. He would not. He refused. Lord Voldemort did not succumb. He conquered.
If only his body agreed with his spirit.
Come to think of it, how had he come to be unconscious in the first place? His memories were as blurred as his vision. Was it a battle? Did he lose? No, that was ridiculous. Lord Voldemort did not lose.
Except, he had, hadn't he? At...Hogwarts, wasn't it? Yes, that was it. The battle at Hogwarts, after Potter had once again cheated death and cheated Voldemort of his ultimate victory. He'd leaped from that oaf...what was his name? Hagmar? Hag...Hagrid. That was it. Potter sprang from the half-giants arms and the battle, so close to being his, began once again. He'd fought Potter, then. Fought him to nearly the bitter end. It was only a last seconds realization that the Elder Wand was fighting him that broke through Voldemort's bloodlust and allowed him to dodge his reflected killing curse in time. What had happened next? He'd...fled, no, regrouped. Yes, he'd decided to regroup. His wand could not be trusted, and Potter had that damnable luck of his on his side. The only sensible option was to gather up his remaining faithful and live to fight another day. He still had the Ministry. Let Potter and his friends hold onto Hogwarts for a little longer. It would belong to Voldemort in the end. Once he found another wand.
But that hadn't happened, had it? After gaining the Elder Wand he'd discarded his old one on top of Dumbledore's corpse. He would need to return to Hogwarts to get it, and that was out of the question. So he sent his Death Eaters in his place. One at a time, so none of them would realize the extent of his powerlessness along with the others. But they had failed. Captured, killed; Voldemort never knew. He was wandless, and his followers were thin in number. What had happened next...? Oh, yes, he'd sent the remaining Death Eaters to hold the Ministry while he apparated to an old safe house across the pond, one he'd retreated to from time to time when he needed to be alone. He kept old experiments there, along with a cellar filled with...he struggled to remember...
Screams. Pleas for mercy. Prayers to a God that would forever go unanswered.
Ah, yes. The muggles. The ones he kept for himself. The ones who captured his attention.
And he'd stayed there, hadn't he? He'd stayed and plotted until he received word that his Ministry had fallen. That his Death Eaters were all killed or captured.
That he had lost.
And oh, how he raged. For weeks he raged, going through his stock of muggles at a prodigious rate. He lost himself in his experiments and his lust for torture. He'd forced the muggles to commit violence and atrocities upon each other. Laughed as they sobbed and begged to die. One of them...Voldemort remembered him more clearly than the rest. His mind had been interesting, hadn't it? Yes, that was it. Voldemort had looked into his mind on a whim and discovered something fractured. Broken. Dark in a way that drew Voldemort in. He was the only one Voldemort hadn't slaughtered by the time...
By the time Potter and his little band had found him.
Rage once again built in Voldemort. That's what happened! He remembered now. He was distracted, as he tended to be during his rages. He hadn't even felt the wards come down. Out of nowhere there was Potter, wand ready and eyes blazing and Voldemort had been so surprised to see him. So surprised, in fact, that this time he didn't dodge the light from the boy's wand. But this light hadn't been green. It had been red.
Potter had stunned Voldemort. And it must have been a strong stunner as well, because Voldemort had never had this much trouble regaining consciousness on the few times he'd ever been hit with a stunner.
Light bled into his vision, bright and painful, but after a few more moments it began to dim and Voldemort could once again see.
At first, as he took in his surroundings, he doubted his sanity. Surely he should be in the deepest cell in Azkaban, awaiting the Kiss or some other such punishment. Not in what, for all the world, appeared to be a muggle flat.
It took him many long minutes to fully understand what he was seeing, his mind somehow still foggy from Potter's spell. Voldemort hadn't spent any real amount of time in the muggle world since he'd graduated Hogwarts, but even to his dulled senses the flat felt stale. As if it hadn't been occupied for some time. Yet it was still furnished and filled with muggle devices Voldemort couldn't identify. In fact, Voldemort was sitting on one of those very pieces of furniture. A couch, if he wasn't mistaken. Though, there was something odd about it...
“Oh, you're awake.”
The voice, thick with an American accent, startled Voldemort. He turned his head towards it...or tried to, at least. His muscles did not want to respond to his commands, so instead he lolled his head to the side just as the man stepped in front of him.
“You...” Voldemort said, his voice slurring dully.
It was the muggle. The one Voldemort hadn't killed.
He wore a muggle suit Voldemort assumed was fashionable, mostly because of the man's hair. Though a bit overlong from weeks of captivity, it was slicked back off his forehead and freshly washed and lustrous in a way that reminded Voldemort of any number of faceless purebloods he'd known over his long life. The unkempt beard had been completely shaved away, revealing a smooth, sharp jawed face that would have been handsome if he hadn't been suffering from weeks of near starvation and almost no sleep. Sallow cheeks, bloodshot eyes; even his clothes hung off of him, as if they'd been tailored for a slightly bigger man.
“I'm going to be honest,” the man said. “I don't think I expected you to be here when I got out of the shower.”
He sounded...off. Honestly confused. He studied Voldemort as if he'd never seen him before, though Voldemort knew they had gotten well acquainted over the last weeks. As well as a torturer and victim could be, at any rate.
“I was ready to chalk the whole thing up to a bad trip...” he trailed off, frowning. “Except, I can't remember the last time I did drugs. That's strange, isn't it? Not knowing something like that.” He let out a quiet little laugh. “I'm actually kind of glad you're still here. At least that way I know I'm not crazy.”
“Where...am I...?” Voldemort asked, forcing the words out.
“My place. I think.” The man looked around, then nodded. “Yeah, this seems like mine, this time. His was more...” He trailed off, eyes glazing over for nearly a full minute before he began blinking rapidly. He smiled, seeming to have lost his train of thought entirely. “Well, let's get to it, then.”
“What...?”
“Would you like a drink?” the man asked, still smiling that disturbingly vacant smile. “You've been out for a while, I think. You must be thirsty.”
“You...will...die...”
“Oh! That's right!” The man snapped his fingers. “I bet your throat's feeling pretty crappy right now, huh? That's okay. It'll pass soon.”
“What...have you...done...?”
“Nothing!” The man's vacant smile grew. “I just thought this would be a good opportunity to talk, man to man. I don't think we did much talking back at the...” His eyes dimmed again. “Hm. Right.” He shook his head. “That was some pretty wild shit, wasn't it? The things you did to those people. What you made them do to each other. What you made me do to them...”
Voldemort tried to move again. He was regaining feeling in his limbs, but he still had trouble controlling them. He did shift a little bit, and when he did something crinkled underneath him.
Was the couch covered in something?
It was. Some kind of clear...plastic?
“I've gotta say, that was some pretty sick shit,” the man continued. “I mean, like right out of my dreams, you know? I don't usually tell people this, but I've actually imagined doing things like that to a lot of people. Never actually got around to it, though.” He paused. “At least, I don't think I did. I almost got a cat, once. But it got away before I could feed it to the damn thing.”
He let out another laugh. “That one definitely happened.”
The same plastic covered the floor in front of the couch...
“But the things we did in that house...damn,” he said. He sounded excited, but his eyes were dull. Blank. “It was exactly how I'd always imagined it. All the screams and the blood. It was exhilarating.”
Voldemort's head was clear, now, but his body still wouldn't respond.
This isn't from the stunner, is it?
“What have you...done to...Lord Voldemort?” he demanded.
“Lord Voldemort? Who's...oh! Is that you?” The man tilted his head. “Yeah, I guess that fits. What with the whole, you know.” He gestured to Voldemort's face. “Though, I swear to God I heard that little four eyed kid call you something else.”
“Silence...”
“An actual name. Like a normal one. What was it?”
“Stop.”
“Tim? No, you're not Tim. Tom! That was it. He called you Tom, didn't he?”
“Don't call me—”
“I like that. Tom. I used to have an upstairs neighbor named Tom, once. Lived in the penthouse.”
The man slipped on a jacket made of...
“Is that...a plastic jacket?”
“Yes, it is! I have to say something before we get going here though. What you did for me in that house? I can't thank you enough. I never thought I'd ever actually get around to doing something with my life. Not like that. Sure, I have a lot of money, and some really comfortable friends, but I gotta tell you—and I feel like I can really share this with you—I've wanted to fucking kill every single one of them for years. But for some reason, all I ever did was think about it. And boy, did I ever think about it. But I don't feel like thinking, anymore. I want to do. I want to make every dream I've ever had into reality. And it's all thanks to you. You've changed my life. I really mean that.”
The man grinned.
For the first time since the Blitz, Voldemort felt something other than hatred and contempt for a muggle. He could remember, now, the things that drew him to this man. The emptiness of his soul. The sheer disgust and contempt he held for the entire human race, himself very much included. The elaborate fantasies concocted in the darkest corners of his mind. Brutal and inelegant though they were, Voldemort couldn't help wondering if those wicked dreams would become more refined if the man knew the possibilities of magic.
Fear. That was what Voldemort felt. His Horcruxes were gone. He had no wand. He could not move. And he felt fear towards this muggle and his dead, soulless smile.
“Say, Tom,” the man said. He leaned against a shelf that held one of the strange muggle contraptions, his finger poised over a button marked PLAY. “Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?”