Chapter 1: Manhunt
The hooded figure fled through the trees, thorns and other undergrowth tearing at his robes and, beneath his robes, his legs- already bloodied and torn. "Running to where?" demanded his treacherous logic. Where could he possibly run to, that would get him out of the grip of what he was running from?
Nowhere- but the longer he kept running, running to nowhere, the longer he could spin out this manhunt, the longer he stayed alive.
Alive, though his breath seemed to burn in him, though his legs were crisscrossed with bleeding cuts, though his head felt unpleasantly light, though his left forearm burned, though he smelled something unpleasantly like the rank of charred flesh. Because he knew, somewhere just below the top level of his mind, that how long he stayed alive was not the point at issue.
How long he evaded those chasing him was everything.
His arm hurt, hurt too much for this to be anything normal- he risked a glance at it, the Mark on it was glowing to incandescence- and that wasn't the horrifying thing, the bad part was that all the flesh around it was now burnt to charcoal. As he watched, a few flecks of feathery ash fell away. The smell of it was awful. The muscles of that arm seemed to be being cooked. He couldn't move his left hand.
And unless he was mistaken, and he seriously hoped he was, he thought he could feel the unpleasant sensation of white-heat on bone…
He stumbled on, and even through a mind that seemed to want to give up and quit on him he noticed that the forest scenery seemed to be growing more familiar. But he didn't have time to worry about that, because he couldn't feel his feet any more, and realized that the pain in his left arm seemed to have abated, but looking at it revealed even worse damage than before- and, while he didn't have much Muggle medical knowledge, he did know that if you couldn't feel the injury it was a bad sign…
His right hand hurt too.
"How can it hurt? You haven't got it."
God, was he going to start hearing things now? As if he hadn't got enough to worry about.
"Yes, Peter. Absolutely."
And a sharp peal of cruel, bodiless laughter in the wind.[a/n: Bit of explanation here may be needed. No one is talking to Wormtail (because it is Wormtail), he is hallucinating. I'm debating whether to keep up the voice or just ditch it. And the reason he's running away? Since GoF he's outlived his usefulness to everyone's least favorite Dark Lord, and in fact has become a liability- Dumbledore said, in PoA, "I'm much mistaken if Voldemort wants his servant in the debt of Harry Potter." I decided that, in that case, his days were numbered (in extremely small numbers) and wrote accordingly. And don't infer anything from the fact that hallucinations consisting of a voice keeping a running commentary on your actions and thoughts are a telling symptom of schizophrenia. ~evil grin~ Next chapter will be longer!]