Note: Here it's a new chapter. This time about the spy and some of Hogwarts's survivors. It's not much, and it has scarcely any explanation, as they will come later. But since you wanted to know about him, and I need some time to properly write Harry's and Draco's encounter, I thought it would be worth it.
And now…
Welcome to:
SPIDERWEB
Chapter 18-The Left Hand.
The sound of the chains dragged by dozens of people through silt and snow, the quiet sobs and painful groans that sometimes rose among the prisoners, until the snap of a whip made them silent, announced to the people in the streets the convoy's arrival.
Civilians emerged from their filthy houses of gray stone, joining passers-by who had stopped on the muddy sidewalk littered with snow and garbage scraps, to gaze at the procession.
They were being steered through one of the streets of the lower and poorer neighborhoods, those that crowded against the walls of the city, like anthills around a piece of musty caramel. Alleys that had grown over the past decade, twisting and piling up against each other to accommodate the wizards who had been forced to flee their homes, and enlist in the census of one of the necropolis of the new regime.
No one who did not have the proper permits could live outside them. Needless to say, very few could afford to.
As such, life in a necropolis was of an immense difference between those who lived within the walls; The Death Eaters and those who served them. And the miserable ones who had to inhabit the infected labyrinth of the outer circle.
Just earning enough to eat in this area was a daily struggle of hard work in some factory, the gargantuan buildings of the regime, or those small businesses that were still barely getting by.
Under these conditions crime proliferated, and prostitution was the only means of support of more than one person. Of more than one family.
Morality was a scarce commodity in a society that had been poisoned by darkness for ten years. The propaganda of the dark lord, that at first could not erode people's beliefs, had since penetrated to the marrow of this alienated community, and corrupted almost everyone.
The terrorists of the order were considered to be the ones who, through their attacks, forced the king to make people live in one, secure, place. They were the ones that caused their hunger, stealing the provisions that their regime mánaged to gatter. Those who slaughtered their children, husbands and brothers... Since who didn't have a relative among the Death Eaters? The army's cannon fodder fed on the recruits who came from the suburbs.
Thus, when the caravan of prisoners of Hogwarts passed through these place, what they received from the crowd were howls of hatred and anger, pieces of garbage and stones being thrown at them, and blows, when the guards who led the procession towards the open doors in the fort, didn't look at them, or voluntarily and cruelly, looked the other way.
A thick chunk of worn red brick was thrown at them, and Remus curved his body what little the chains allowed, to protect Teddy from the blow.
It slammed into his shoulder with a thud, and the pain flickered through the already battered joint. But Remus barely registered the sensation as one more wound his body was struggling to heal. His recovery rate, being a werewolf, was greater than that of the vast majority, and he was not worried about a few more blows to his already battered casing.
All his attention was on Teddy.
His son kept walking just because Remus held as much of his weight as he could. The boy's soft hair, now of an ashy brown hue, clung to his skull matted with blood and dust, as his striped pajamas hung like rags from his thin figure, dirty from the blood of the wound on his side.
When the castle collapsed, Teddy had been helping the last children to flee. A piece of debris had crushed his collarbone, and when they tried to capture him, a curse had pierced his side. It was a miracle that Remus had found him among the prisoners, before they were chained. However, he had not been able to examine the wound.
The few words he had tried to exchange had been silenced when it became apparent that Teddy needed all his energy to walk. But even before that, his state of shock has been obvious, as he had not uttered a word since they met,
The lycanthrope did not know how much more his son would be able to endure, and he had already seen what the guards were doing with those who were unable to keep up.
A useless slave is the same as a dead slave.
"Papa ..." The voice came out half drowned out in gasps of contained pain, a murmur amid the racket of the angry crowd. Teddy's first word in hours.
"Ssssh. Keep your strength."
Teddy staggered, and Remus had to push him with his shoulder to hold the boy up.
A guard looked at them for a moment, but they managed to move on, and the werewolf was able to relax the sudden tense rope of his spine as the Death Eater turned his back on them. His momentary interest lost, once it was obvious neither were going to fall.
"Papa." his son tried again, weaker.
"Teddy, you have to try and keep walking." It was all he could say now. It was all he allowed himself to think about.
If they managed to get wherever they were being taken, they might be put together in some cell where he could at least examine his son's wounds. Where they could lie down and rest some.
But Teddy did not shut up.
"Dad," he muttered. "I've seen how they killed Mom." - His voice, like an animal run over, dead, and completely broken.
oOo
The black castle rose in the center of the city, Its towers like swords stretching towards the black night sky. Its windows, narrow sackcloths of huge stained-glass, flashed like fatuous fires with the bright light of the interior. From each and every one of the wrought iron needles that crowned the towers, flags waved in the icy air, proudly displaying the shield of the skull and the serpent. Music came out of the building in deceptively beautiful and cheerful notes.
Today the Dark Lord and all his court celebrated the victory. And the rooms had never been so full, the tables of the immense throne room, placed for the party, so loaded with food. Wine had never flowed so freely here.
Guests crowded into the great hall, their dresses and elegant robes, silks and velvets, gleaming under candlelight. Faces obscured by delicate and exquisitely carved, skull masks.
Sitting on the throne, that cursed object of black iron and obsidian, that reeked of blood and viscera, Lord Voldemort himself, proud and undaunted, presided over the celebration.
He looked like a young man, no older than thirty, with glossy black hair and strange serpentine eyes. On this occasion, as in all previous ones, the body he had stolen for himself was an example of physical perfection; Athletic, tall and beautiful.
No one questioned the Dark Lord's aspect, as he had long since made custom of devouring souls, inhabiting a new body for a while, until another drew his attention.
It was common for this to happen once every couple of years.
His eyes, however, always remained the same malicious orbs.
Nagini, his familiar, the huge black snake, curled at his feet, resting her head on his knees, camouflaging within the dark hue of his silk robe.
Nearby, his right hand, Lord Malfoy, the man whose hair was as discolored as his soul, watched the environment behind a mask of ivory and silver, and signaled to the guards to let the prisoners pass.
The hero of the night was to choose his prize.
On the other side of the dark lord, standing at the same height as the icy blonde Lord, another man, obscure as the darkness of the bottom of a pond, studied those who entered from the slits of his mask, made of deceptively simple bone.
No one knew whom was the skull that had given that mask, but rumors had had time to spread through the court in the few hours that this man had been standing next to the king.
Nothing drew the interest of these indolent nobles, like the delicate exercise of the blade the tongue can turn into.
The dark man, as still as a statue, as cold as one, did not listen, and if he did, the words passed by him like mere particles of dust, and just as inconsistent.
When Remus was dragged into the banquet room with the rest of the prisoners, the smells of the ladies' overly strong perfumes, the sweat of hundreds of people and the aroma of food, so much food, as well as the blaring music, and light, pierced his delicate senses, bringing him forcefully back to reality.
The party felt like a nightmare, in which the only thing that made sense was his need to protect Teddy at all costs. The idea ... the notion ... that ... that ...
He could not even think of Ninfadora dead. Tonks, his Tonks, who had kissed him that same morning, still half asleep, with her arms and legs, so soft and warm, tangled in his, her breath on his neck, her curious turquoise eyes locked on his face, and her mane a precious pink hue tickling his nose. His wife, his lover, his best friend, couldn't be dead.
He would not believe it until he saw the corpse with his own eyes. Teddy could be wrong, the shock and blood loss were bound to be confusing.
However, Remus's heart was beating like an out-of-the-way machine, and his body could not move a millimeter away from his son. He did not want to turn away a millimeter. And he knew it was not just because without his support, he would have collapsed. It was the desperate, instinctive need to make sure Teddy, at least, was still here. He could not lose the only member of his little family he had left, he could not.
Guards forced all the prisoners to move until they were deposited at the feet of the Dark King, trapped like a flock surrounded by wolves in front of the long white and pristine marble staircase that ascended to the throne.
Lord Voldemort raised a hand imperiously, and the music, the conversations, everything, fell in silence. Then the terrible Lord stood up slowly and deliberately, his long black robe whispering round his tall, deceptively young figure, and to his thin and distinguished lips a smile as sharp as the edge of a blade blossomed.
"Tonight," his voice rose in the silence like a bat in the night air, perfect and elusive. All the guests stretched out to grasp it, with something akin to adoration. "Tonight, we have overcome those who still dared to oppose us. We have finally united the world under our rightful dominion!" The assembled people broke into a unique south of glory. "And it was thanks to this man. This spy," he said the word with utter malice and calmness, "which has served me so faithfully. His long, clawed fingers, brushed the man's arm in an almost intimate gesture. "That's why tonight I call him my left hand. My new executor."
The crowd erupted in cheers and applause. No one would ask about the man who had occupied the post the day before, rumors of how he had failed his Dark Lord, already flourished in the city. And you just didn't fail the king… and continued alive.
"Now, as I promised," he said in a calmer, softer tone, only for the man who remained as immutable as a stone statue. "Choose whomever you wish."
"Are these all?"
"Yes. I've ordered them all be brought."
The man then descended the stairs one by one, watching the battered, exhausted, wounded, prisoners, clenched tightly together before this court that watched them as flesh to be bitten. And then he raised his hand and pointed at two of them.
"Those two."
Remus shuddered. He knew that voice.
A pair of guards seized him and Teddy, releasing the chains that bound them to the rest of the slaves, to drag them toward the waiting man. Remus did not have the strength to resist, his bones felt watery, his skin icy, his heart seemed about to break inside the box of his ribs.
When they put them in front of him, the scent of the spy's skin came to his nostrils, and with a horrible crack crept through his body in a wave of titanic power, breaking what little of his resistance remained, as if it were paper, soft sand. If the guards had not caught him, he would have fallen down like a stringless puppet.
A single word, filled with horror, left his lips:
"Sirius …"
Pain became something alive within Remus; A poisonous insect, a paper-thin blade. Sharp, toxic, impossible to deny.
Not when the expensive perfumes of the ladies, and the fatty and succulent smells of food, were unable to hide the scent of his best friend; male sweat, tucked into wood smoke and traces of his canine form (damp dog, and alpha male), to which lately had also adhered, the dark scent of blood from the the last battle he fought in.
A smell as familiar as the beating of his own heart.
A perfume that always made him think of fierceness, protection, and brought to his bloodstream that deep brotherly love, they shared (he had thought they shared).
That Black had not changed at all, in spite of everything, broke his heart in pieces.
Remus thought his lungs must be filled with ice chips, because he could not stop shivering.
'... Tonks ... Hogwarts ... Sirius …' His brain was incapable of basing anything coherent beyond the shock.
He couldn't understand what he was seeing. Did not want to understand!
Draco's words echoed inside him like a broken recording; "There's a spy in the inner circle." The pain, so similar to electrodes nailed to his skin, had turned his thoughts into mud.
He felt like an open wound; Bleeding, vulnerable, broken.
Instinctively, Remus sought the blue gaze behind the bone mask, trying to understand, anchor to something. But the indigo irises were not the intense, ever-changing, beautiful blue of the clean sky, he remembered. They were the almost black shade of deep waters, deceptively quiet.
The metaphorical fingers he'd tried to spread, slipped on the icy surface of the frozen pupils, and Remus felt himself losing his last grip on reality. The darkness of shock extending its arms to receive him completely.
Everything that came later dissipated in the nightmare in which the world had been transmuted, and in the suffering that permeated every nerve ending and neural connection of his organism.
His memories fuzzy, disjointed; Teddy hanging like a rag from the arms of their captors, almost unconscious, the imposing figure of Sirius, opening the court on his way in waves of bowing, murmuring people, the shimmering colors of the silks, and the malicious black eyes of the masks, dancing and dancing making him nauseous.
A familiar voice, perhaps Ron's, screaming something in anger, far, far away, somewhere between the tumult of slaves chained as animals.
Vague images such as insubstantial mist, of corridors and stairs. The immense weight of his own limbs. Teddy, the only thing that still pushed him to resist unconsciousness, as shock tried to engulf him in darkness.
His boy already unconscious. The pain filtering inside his organs, bones, brain… as he was pushed, thrown, forced ... like a drugged animal, to his enter a pair of carved metal doors, and to the rooms beyond them.
High ceilings, gray stone walls, and dark wood furniture welcomed them, with the smell of burning wood, rain, and dripping candle wax.
He only managed to crawl into reality, when the guards who held his son began to move away through another door, and the Death Eaters who grabbed him, did not move to follow them.
"Teddy ..." The name slid out his cold lips, barely comprehensible.
His head was spinning. His body trembled uncontrollably under a cold fever. The effort to speak was as unpleasant as swallowing sand. His breathing had become a rough traction, inside the closed walls of his throat, and his tongue felt like a swollen sponge.
But Remus managed to force his body to collaborate, through the limitations imposed by the disconnected state of his mind.
"Where are they taking him? …" His question was not heard, or the Death Eater did not want to answer it. His son was moving farther away, and with each step that put him a little more out of his reach, Remus felt his heartbeat grow more and more frantic.
"... Teddy …" The door began to close after his son ... 'My son.' The notion slippery inside his skull.
His boy, unconscious, bloody, and in the hands of men who smelled of black magic and rust. While he himself was still, soft, dizzy, unable to follow. The agony, terribly intense, began to throb with the beat of his heart, mingling in a delirious litany.
"Teddy ..." he moaned. From the blackness within his brain, indefinite images of the massacre at Hogwarts began to emerge.
Tonks, Sirius ... So much agony...
Suddenly it was hot, so hot ...
The Death Eater at his right seemed to hear him at last, and his complaint must have offended him, for his mouth, beneath the simple white mask that marked him as a Death Eater of the most humble rank, had twisted into an unpleasant grimace.
"Shut up." An order accompanied by the even more violent pressure of the fingers around his arm. Surely there would be marks that would bloom in bruises. But Remus was already very close to drowning completely in the violently red roar of his own blood, and he did not perceive the warning.
"W-where … are they take him?" He asked again, gasping, not knowing if he had come to pronounce the words correctly. Everything was, little by little, reducing to a series of images that came faster and faster, like an horror movie.
The guard hissed resentfully, and his question must have been discernible, because in spite of everything, he was responding. Maybe he hoped it would shut him up.
"A wounded slave is no use."
"A wounded slave is no use ..." Similar phrases he had heard on the march here, bubbled up his raging psyche, and mingled in a corrosive cocktail with all that was already there; Words like useless, defective, unnecessary merchandise ... that had to be thrown away, joined with the memory of the blood of his loved ones, and the cries of the dead.
His reaction was that of a volatile solution; Explosive.
"TEDDYYYYYYY!" The twisted, inhuman sound, that left his throat, startled everyone present.
All those ingredients had been consolidated into a single coherent thought: TEDDY WAS TO DIE. So big and furious, that Remus knew that it would spill out of his skull, and draw with it his sanity.
His body, that until that moment had hung soft and weak like a shredded cloth, from the arms of the two men, stiffened violently, and all his muscles hardened in a second, flooded by the strength of something inhuman. The impossible horror of the thought, and the pain he could no longer contain within his emaciated figure, broke him.
Remus twisted like a wolf in a hunting trap, quick and deadly. Neither of the two Death Eaters had expected it, and they did not react in time to hold him. The werewolf freed himself.
Pain, pain, everything was pain, pain, pain ... TEDDY!
His body curled, the inner beast finally, after years of confinement, and yearning for full moon's light, broke the shackles of his master's will, Remus, and offered his strength, his fierce violence, the thirst for blood, in exchange of freedom and the possibility of saving his son.
Soft brown hair blossomed through his skin. Curved claws and sawed fangs were born in his jaw and in the phalanges of the tips of his fingers. The irises became gold, and the beast roared, instinctively seeking those responsible for his pain.
The creature that had been Remus, threw himself at the Death Eaters. Tearing cloth and skin, destroying everything he could find on his way to the call of the beating hearts of these beings who tried to keep him away from his puppy.
The guards screamed, and one of them howled in pain, like a pig in the slaughterhouse, when Remus' claws cut his cheek in four parallel lines, and pierced the eye socket with a sickening sound of suction to extirpate the eyeball.
The other Death Eater was out of his reach, and he managed to extract his wand to point it to the uncontrolled lycanthrope, wondering why no one had warned them they were dealing with one, and why, none of the slave traders, had him bound in silver shackles instead of the common iron ones that all the prisoners carried.
'Damn it, damn it, dammit!'
"Avada ... "
The fingers of the man who was the dark man's left hand closed on the wrist with which he held his wand, with enough violence to ground the bones in an ominous way.
"Ag! ...Yes ... sir?..." He turned his head toward him, disoriented and incredulous.
The look that the executor gave him made the humble Death Eater shudder involuntarily. He had met many dark wizards, but none with blue eyes like those. Eyes that made him think of sewage, deceptively quiet, and things that lurked in the dark.
"Out." The voice came out calm and icy, not an octave higher than usual, but he didn't need the order repeated.
He was freed.
There were red marks where the Executioner had touched him, yet, he didn't utter a word of complaint.
Instead he left as fast he could, not looking at his companion left behind. Better him, than his skin.
Sirius heard the door close behind the coward, not looking away from Remus, now crouched over the man he'd knocked down, biting and tearing as the bloody Death Eater continued howling like a wild animal. The movements of his prey were getting clumsy and soft, as it became more and more evident, he was not going to survive.
The screams soon became drowned moans of despair, and moist sounds of flesh being torn.
Sirius had seen Fenrir and his pack enough times to recognize the signs that marked a lycanthrope who has abandoned himself to the beast. And to know that Remus would not be approachable, until he quenched his thirst for blood and the wolf calmed down ... or someone stopped him.
Sirius took off his mask to leave it on the table, as he pulled out his wand.
The werewolf looked up.
"Stupefy."
To be continue
Note: Do you think I should make Sirius want Remus? As in a sexual way?