Cut and Captured

Voldemort raised one of his long white fingers and put it very close to Harry's cheek.

‘His mother left upon him the traces of her sacrifice....This is old magic, I should have remembered it, I was foolish to overlook it...but no matter. I can touch him now.’

Harry felt the cold tip of the long white finger touch him, and thought his head would burst with the pain. Voldemort laughed softly in his ear, then took the finger away and continued addressing the Death Eaters.

The feel of Voldemort’s touch against Harry’s skin had momentarily redirected his pain away from the wound on his leg, only for him to be overwhelmed by it again the second the man had taken his skeletal finger away. Despite shifting all of his weight onto his unruined leg, his injured one was still shaking, bleeding profusely from the incision, staining the inside of his trousers. The crux of his right elbow stung where Wormtail had cut him, but the damage to his arm was relatively superficial in comparison—not that it mattered in his condition.

His blood was still flowing freely from both wounds and would only continue.

He should have treated himself in the maze, should have done it at the exact moment Cedric had rescued him from the spider’s pincers, before the two of them had agreed to take the cup together and tie the Triwizard Tournament in a joint victory for Hogwarts. Then perhaps his reflexes would have been sharper, his body stronger—he could have disarmed Wormtail before he had even had the chance to lift his wand, summoned the Portkey and taken them back to the heart of the maze where he would have sent up a flare, and then Wormtail would have had no blood from the enemy with which to complete his gruesome task.

Perhaps then Cedric would still be alive and Voldemort without form.

At the very least, Harry would have stood a chance.

Instead, he was going to die. This he knew. Surrounded on all sides by Death Eaters, Lord Voldemort himself presiding over their reunion.

There was nothing for it.

Silence once more; nothing was stirring, not even the leaves on the yew tree. The Death Eaters were quite motionless, the glittering eyes in their masks fixed upon Voldemort, and upon Harry.

Voldemort would want to duel; he would not settle for anything less than killing Harry with his own wand, but not before humiliating the Boy Who Lived before the sea of grotesque masks in his periphery.

But Voldemort would not get his wish. Harry’s eyelids had already started to feel heavy, his ability to concentrate on the scene around him waning; he knew that he would be unconscious before long, and that without receiving the life-sustaining array of potions in his bag he would fall into a coma from which he would not wake. The bag itself had fallen off his shoulder the moment the Portkey had slammed them into the ground, and it now lay near Cedric’s body, some twenty feet away.

Even if he did make to summon the contents he needed in his last moments of living wakefulness, he would not be able to take them without aid. And that was to say nothing of the full body bind that had him tied to the tombstone of Voldemort’s father.

Harry almost wished he could see the look of fury that would cross the Dark Lord’s face when he realised it was too late, that Harry was already dead or as good as. And all the while, as the last of his energy drained away with the blood loss, Harry found some comfort in knowing that Voldemort would not get what he had always wanted in the end.

If only Voldemort had known his secret all those years ago. He could have pricked his finger and been done with it.

The pain was less now, distant, and his breaths had become deeper, almost sleepy. Someone would need to take in Hedwig. His friends would see to it that she was well cared for in his absence, loved even. And they would write to Sirius.

They would tell him what had happened.

Voldemort’s voice rose and fell low to a murmur as Harry’s vision started to double, and then blur around the edges as he closed his eyes for the last time. His other senses lingered, briefly, as they often do in those moments before a most profound sleep—the scent of the damp in the cool breeze, the feel of the hard stone against his back, and the sound of mounting expectation in Voldemort’s speech—

‘… a Portkey, which would bring him here, beyond the reach of Dumbledore's help and protection, and into my waiting arms.’

Mrs Weasley—who would tell Mrs Weasley?

The Boy Who Lived.

The boy who had survived as an infant only to die now, alone and on display in the muggle graveyard of Little Hangleton.

He should have treated himself in the maze; he might have lived then.

And in the moment just before his mind gave way to darkness, it was as though Harry Potter could hear the voice of Albus Dumbledore in his head, repeating the words he had once said to him almost as if in a dream: ‘The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.’

‘And here he is...the boy you all believed had been my downfall....’