Cut and Captured

Not a moment after the familiar whisps came out of Lucius Malfoy’s wand, he tipped the contents of three phials which stood waiting on the nightstand beside him down the Potter boy’s throat. The boy fell heavily back onto the bed where he would sleep until the last of the potions made their way through his system.

It was only a matter of time before the final cycle of the boy’s treatment ran its course, assuring that any and all of the potions still coursing through him worked in harmony with each other so that he might come out of the critical state he had entered in the graveyard. While his blood had long stopped flowing, his veins closed up and the skin healed over on his right leg and elbow, the boy’s internal balance would take longer still to stabilise, as was often the case with magical maladies and their treatments.

After wiping away the fresh blood from the boy's nose and casting a quick drying spell to get rid of the tonic the boy had caused to spill before it stained the bedding beyond even what the best of wizarding cleaning products could manage, Lucius Malfoy turned his attention to his elm and dragon heartstring wand, eyeing it most suspiciously.

It had been over a decade since the man had last cast the Serillio charm. In fact, he was hardly convinced he had thought to cast the spell at all, let alone utter the incantation. And yet it had spouted from the tip of his wand as if it had been yesterday.

Almost of its own accord.

There had been a time, it was true, when he had relied quite strongly on the charm, which itself was staple spellwork for professional healers, meant to temporarily induce a state of tranquil compliance so that they could administer droughts and other tonics to the witch or wizard in their charge. Draco was still in the nursery in those days, and it would not have done well for the wizarding world to discover that his mother Enora Malfoy, née Harcourt-Gaines, was in failing health, and so her deterioration was shielded from the public. It remained a family affair for several years, with Lucius, but more so Narcissa, seeing to the matriarch’s comfort and care behind closed doors. When Draco grew old enough to understand that the old woman in the east wing was his grandmother and he must not reveal a word about her to another soul, Enora was secretly removed to the ancestral home of the Harcourts in France, where rumour had it she still haunted the old castle ruins in the north-western quadrant of the expansive property.

What spell he had meant to cast he didn’t know, but he was quite certain it wasn’t meant to be a healer’s help, not when the Imperio curse would have been much more tempting to subject the Boy Who Lived to.

The thought of forcing the brat who had lost him his house-elf, who regularly meddled in the affairs of wizards he would have done well never to cross, who by sheer luck had thwarted the Dark Lord as an infant and whose allegiances were a stain on the once noble line of purebloods from which his ancestors came, to obey was a very tempting thought indeed.

Then again, perhaps it was for the best. The Dark Lord did have a particularly unusual relationship with the boy which went beyond the mere hatred or irritation he felt for his vast number of enemies. Death, the end met by so many in opposition to his lord’s power, would never have been enough for Potter; the Dark Lord would have seen him humiliated first. He would make sure that Potter knew his place, proved himself the superior wizard, silencing his dissenters and Potter’s allies once and for all as he allowed Potter his chance to stand, fight and fail at his full capacity and with his full wits about him.

Not that ‘wits’ were the sort of attribute that Lucius Malfoy would ever consider Harry Potter to have, but it was the essence of the thing which really mattered.

Despite that the boy’s magical abilities were middling at best, if not completely unexceptional, Potter had allegedly proven impervious to magical control when subjected to it during one of Alastor Moody’s Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons earlier that year. Lucius’ only son Draco had seen it with his own eyes. Draco, who had always been undignifiedly jealous of precious, perfect, pompous Potter and the praise he received from every corner of the wizarding world down to the grubbiest toadstools in the Dark Forest, had bemoaned the fact at Christmas, evidently fooled, as many others in attendance had been, into finding it noteworthy.

In truth, Lucius had found it surprising, no, startling that one of Dumbledore’s own appointees would show—let alone subject—his students to Unforgivables in the classroom. Then again, Mad-Eye Moody was a batty old codger who had more than lost his mind some years ago, and it was common knowledge that Albus Dumbledore favoured such peculiar dolts for the position lest someone clever come along and enlighten the student population about the real Dark Arts in all their glory.

It was no wonder Potter had managed to throw off the ex-auror’s Imperio curse, he had told Draco—Moody himself hardly possessed the commanding finesse required to truly subject another witch or wizard, powerful or otherwise, to his control. That knowledge had seemed to calm Draco’s ruffled feathers just enough to leave Potter’s name out of conversation for the remainder of the holidays.

Well, at least until after pudding.

The boy, thinking himself the invincible hero, had long been arrogant and insufferable. Yet Lucius Malfoy knew the truth; he understood well that Potter’s fame, reputation and imagined power equally stemmed from a combination of Potter’s own blunders and exceptionally unprecedented ability to be in the right place at the right time, the wrong place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time and its reverse.

Not to mention, the help he received from those far more powerful and competent than he could even imagine.

Had it not been the Dark Lord’s own faithful servant, a Death Eater hidden amongst the ranks of Hogwarts’ finest, who had ensured the boy would win the Triwizard Tournament, would reach the Portkey so that he might be delivered to the graveyard? Who had assured the Dark Lord’s return?

If only Lucius had known, he would have joined him, helped him.

Alas, he had missed the signs of his Lord’s growing strength, his impending returned, and they stood out now in his memory as clear as the Dark Mark had in the night sky following the Quidditch World Cup.

What he would have given to witness the Dark Lord’s rebirth for himself! Lucius Malfoy was not unknowledgeable of the glorious secrets the Dark Arts could reveal to him. But the old piece of Dark Magic, the potion that had revived his Lord that night was something not even he could dream up in his wildest fantasies.

Bone of the father. Flesh of the servant. Blood of the enemy, for which reason Potter had been there in the graveyard that night—not only to witness the ritual, but to take part in it. Even though any wizard who had hated the Dark Lord would have sufficed….

The key ingredient, the one which his Lord had said he must use if he was to rise again, more powerful than he had been when he had fallen.

The boy’s blood.

No wonder a few crisply printed words on a thin, pocket-sized card had intrigued the Dark Lord enough for the boy to be lying here now, spared for the moment in his own care, at the direct orders of Lord Voldemort himself.

The back of the card had contained more or less the same information in the third person, along with the contact information for Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall and a specialist from the Internal Maladies and Afflictions Ward at St. Mungo’s.

Lucius fixed his gaze on the potioned-out boy, watching as he took deep, even breaths, the yellow pallor his skin had taken from the blood loss all but gone. He had done well in the service of his Lord.

But regardless of the success of his treatment, Potter would likely be subdued, weaker and far more disoriented than he usually would have been when he finally came to, at least for a time. From the diagnostic report he had conducted in the greenhouse, it was clear that the boy had been nearly comatose by the time Lucius had begun to administer the potions to him; and even if Potter would gradually become more coherent now that he was past the worst of it, he would have little success in trying to escape. Malfoy Manor was heavily warded, Potter’s little chamber even more so.

Besides, the boy would quickly come to realise that he must cooperate should he wish to receive any additional pain suppressants and other desirable items which he was bound to need for some time, or so Lucius had gathered while perusing the journal that contained the boy's medical log.

The boy had no idea of the paradox of his situation, but the irony was not lost on Lucius Malfoy: the irony that Potter’s value was, and perhaps had always been, completely determined by the ambitions and foolishness of others.

Exactly what the Dark Lord planned to do with the Boy Who Lived, Lucius Malfoy could only begin to imagine. But one thing he did know for sure.

It was only the beginning.