1981
The young death eater stood sweating over a cauldron. He had not been in the service of the Dark Lord for more than a few weeks, but even that brief time was more than long enough to convince him that he might, perhaps, have been mistaken in joining the service of Voldemort.
He had joined that service out of hatred, only to find that his hatred was not as strong as he thought it had been. Certainly not strong enough to stomach the things the Dark Lord had him do to innocents whom had never offended him. Although there were those that he did hate, his main emotions towards the vast majority of humanity consisted largely of indifference, mixed with a cynical contempt of sorts towards minds that were for the most part, of a caliber far below his own. Which, he increasingly had to admit to himself, also included the one he served. The Dark Lord's sole talents, if they could be called that, lay almost entirely in the ability to perform crude acts of violence and blasphemy. Not for him the subtle art of mixing herbs and minerals in refined proportions in a cauldron. Though he was eager enough to make use of the potions, he left their brewing to his betters.
Yes, he did think of himself as the Dark Lord's better. The Dark Lord, for all his power, was as stupid as everyone else the young Death Eater held in contempt. And the rewards he had been given, thus far, for his service to the Dark Lord, had been somewhat less than he had hoped for. Though he was promised revenge in the form of torture on those who had harmed him in the past, thus far that had not occurred, he had only been given innocents to torture, and the people he truly hated had gotten away free. As for the other things he had been promised, some of them he had been given, some he had not. But those he had been given, he liked far less than he thought he would a short while back. Women, for instance. The Dark Lord had promised him women, and on that he had delivered. But the young Death Eater had found that the reality was not as good as he had imagined. He was an ugly youth, had always been, and as such had little experience with women other than those he had obtained through bribery or blackmail. The thought of all the women he wanted had been attractive, he had even enjoyed it for a while, but it had palled quickly. He found that he did not care for the female Death Eaters, who lay in his bed like a stone, looking at him in contempt as they fulfilled what was, to them, merely another dull task in Voldemort's service. Nor did he care for the muggles or captured female wizards the Dark Lord allowed him to rape. He found that he craved neither indifference, nor fear in his bed. He wanted he wanted He did not know for certain what he wanted, never having experienced it. He wanted a woman who would look at him with love in her eyes, and hold him after they had finished making love. What he wanted, in other words, was the one thing neither the Dark Lord nor anyone else could ever provide him.
It was with something of relief that the young Death Eater had discovered that he could use the excuse of needing to mind his cauldrons full of potions to avoid attending any of the increasingly distasteful attacks or revels the Dark Lord and his other followers often engaged in. Killing and rutting like the animals they were. He would far rather be alone in a dim room lit only by the flames under the cauldrons, and alone with his thoughts.
So it was rather a surprise to him to be interrupted on this particular day by a small group of older Death Eaters, several years in the Dark Lord's service. They burst in on him after a perfunctory knock at the door that they did not even give him a chance to answer.
"What are you doing in here?" The young Death Eater sneered at them. "Can you not see that I have work to do? Close the door, the drafts are chilling my cauldrons."
One of the Death Eaters slammed the door shut. A violent gesture that seemed to betoken extreme nervousness rather than hostility.
"Sorry." The unwelcome visitors shuffled around for a bit, before one of them addressed him.
"We need your help, right?"
The young Death Eater looked down his long nose at his visitors. "With what? My job is to brew potions for the Dark Lord. He has given me a long list of potions he wants. Enough to keep me busy for months. If you want a potion for yourselves, the proper thing to do is to ask the Dark Lord about it first. If he believes it to be important, he will tell me."
He turned away. Truth be told, he didn't really care what these strange Death Eaters wanted. His aim in telling them to relay their request to the Dark Lord was mainly to get rid of them so he could be alone once more.
"We don't need any potions. We need your help with something else. Won't take long. We'd pay you well for your time and trouble, right?"
The young Death Eater considered these words. If they were offering to pay him, they were obviously doing something behind the Dark Lord's back. Depending on what it was, and how angry it would make the Dark Lord if it were discovered, it might be worthwhile helping them with. Not for the pay, but rather for the future ability to blackmail them into favors. He took out his wand and cast a charm at the flames under the cauldrons, shrinking them so that the cauldron could simmer for a few hours without being attended to.
"I see." He said in a carefully neutral voice. "And what is it you would have me assist you with?"
One of the Death Eater, who seemed to have appointed himself spokesperson for the rest, stepped towards him, and after licking his lips nervously. "Well, it's like this. We want you to help us hide something."
The young Death Eater looked at the one who had spoken in contempt. "And what do you need my help with that for? If you have something to hide, then you would be best off simply hiding it and not telling me about it. The more people who know about it, the less safe your secret is."
"Umm. Yeah. Well, we want to protect it better than just stowing it somewhere. We want to make sure no-one can ever find it. We were thinking of casting the Fidelius spell on it. It's worked well enough for the Potters, and other people. And making you the Secret Keeper. No-one knows you know about it, they would never guess you were the Secret Keeper."
"Do you really think I am stupid enough or suicidal enough to help you conceal something from the Dark Lord?" The young Death Eater asked.
"It ain't the Dark Lord we want to hide it from." The Death Eater told him. He seemed about to add more, but then thought better of it. "Look, we have it right outside. Why don't you come and look at it, and then decide. What do you have to lose?"
The young Death Eater snorted to himself. It was possible that this was all some test of loyalty, engineered by the Dark Lord. But if that were the case, he could always claim later that he was only pretending to go along with those treacherous to the Dark Lord, so as to discover the full extent of their betrayal and reporting them later. He let himself be led outside by the others, and was slightly surprised that what had been a bright day had become quite cold and gloomy. It was not much brighter outside than it had been in his chambers, in fact. He blinked nonetheless, more through reflex than because of any real light.
There were other Death Eaters out there, guarding a large box covered with a tarp. At a nod from their leader, one of them swept the canvas off of it, and let the young Death Eater gaze at what they had hidden there.
He stared at it for a very long time, saying nothing. Finally he turned to the Death Eater nearest him.
"You want me to hide that? THAT?"
The older Death Eater nodded, and the younger one's forming opinion of his visitors as fools solidified. He could not conceive of the necessity of even bothering to hide the thing they were showing him for the simple reason that he could not conceive of any circumstances whatsoever under which anyone in his right mind would ever want to look for such a thing.
Obviously his visitors were fools, animals panicked by the own workings of their paranoid imaginations. Still, even fools could be useful, and in the future he might be glad to have them owing him favors. So after one long, last look at the thing in the box, he nodded his silent agreement to their proposal.
Thus it was that the thing in the box was taken via Apparating to a gloomy cave, sealed in with wards, and protected by the bond of the Fidelius spell. The young Death Eater, who was quite curious by nature, wondered for a few days just WHY these other Death Eaters had been so desperate to hide it. But though he got no answers, he did not wonder for long. The Dark Lord kept him busy, and eventually he had other things on his mind, such as his own decision to leave the service of the Dark Lord, which was followed by other events so chaotic that the thing in the cave was all but forgotten, relegated to a dusty and little visited corner of his mind. Many things happened over the time that passed, including the arrests and executions of those who had originally sought out his help in hiding the thing. And in the end, the return of the Dark Lord himself. Through all that time, though, the young Death Eater who had become a man did not think often on the thing in the cave. After all, despite the fears of the other Death Eaters, no-one had ever come looking for the thing. It was all but forgotten, an unimportant footnote to a mistaken period of his life.
It was over 15 years before he was ever to remember it again.
