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The attack comes without warning.
One moment, Harry is at Voldemort’s side, holding his hand and laughing as he leads the man through Diagon Alley. The next, the crack of multiple apparitions sounds, and they’re surrounded. In the ensuing chaos, they take out almost a dozen of their dark-robed attackers, until there’s only a handful left standing. And then one of them gets lucky, and Harry stills when he feels the sharp press of a knife at his throat.
“Wand down, Potter,” his captor says, making no attempt to disguise the naked glee in his voice. Harry grits his teeth and does as he’s told, angry at himself for letting himself be caught.
Satisfied with Harry’s compliance, the man chuckles, and then—
“Voldemort!” his captor calls, and his lover turns with a snarl on his face.
When he sees Harry in the man’s arms, sees the knife he holds, his eyes narrow. “What do you want?” he asks, voice flat.
“I am here to—”
Voldemort snarls, and his grip on his wand turns white-knuckled. “What do you want?”
The man chuckles again, and for all that he’s never been one to share Voldemort’s appreciation for casual murder, Harry wants nothing more than to kill him. “I want you to listen,” he says.
“Very well,” Voldemort says, all but spitting the words. “Speak.”
What follows is a speech Harry pays little attention to. He knows what those who still resists Voldemort’s rule think of him. He knows how they think, what they want. He used to be one of them, after all. No, he doesn’t listen to it, because he doubts they have anything new to say.
Instead, he watches Voldemort.
As he listens to the man speak, his lover paces. Harry can see the way his patience wears thin.
But he can’t say anything, he knows.
These people must know that they can’t kill Voldemort, that anything they might try against him, he can counter. Which means they’re here for something else.
They’re here to hurt him.
And they’re going to use Harry to do it.
Finally, the man stops speaking. For a moment, there is only the sound of the wards their attackers raised humming as Voldemort thinks.
“Tell me, then,” Voldemort says. “What’s next?”
The knife is steady against Harry’s throat. Voldemort’s eyes remain fixed on it.
“First,” his captor says, and Harry can’t tell if his bravado is false or not, “we kill your traitor lover—”
“Oh, I understood that part, I assure you,” Voldemort says. He paces forward, and the man holding the knife to Harry’s neck stumbles back, dragging him with. Harry hopes Voldemort knows what he’s doing. “What comes after?"
“We—”
“For your sake,” Voldemort says, as if the man hadn’t spoken, “it’d better be my death, and it’d better stick.”
The knife slips. Harry hisses, more from surprise than pain. Of all the awful things he’s experienced, the hot trickle of his own blood as it drips down his neck is among the worst, if only for the sheer discomfort it causes.
“I'm alright—” Harry says, slipping into parseltongue, because Voldemort has never been rational in the face of his pain at another’s hands.
“Shut up!” the man at his back snarls, jerking his head back.
Harry forces himself to breathe, to keep calm. He can feel the way his lover’s control is beginning to slip, and while Lord Voldemort may be the best dueler this side of the equator, there’s little that could beat a knife for speed.
If he breaks, so will Voldemort. And then…
But Voldemort is already breaking—his magic lashes through the air around him like a whip, cracking the ground at his feet.
“If you kill him,” his lover says, voice devoid of anything but the promise of violence—and Harry aches to hear it because he’d been doing so well lately, and now all that progress is lost, “I will destroy you and all you love. I will hunt you and your ilk to extinction. I will burn cities, tear the world to ash. I will not stop.”
Harry feels the way the man holding him shakes, the way his breathing grows rapid, uneven. He’s scared now, Harry thinks, and he should be.
For a long moment, no one moves.
Then, the arm holding the knife to his neck tenses, and the wards around them shatter. He doesn’t even have time to blink before the Aurors apparate in. In a flash of red light, his captor is blasted away, and Harry is left standing alone, reeling.
All around him, their attackers are fleeing the scene.
Harry almost expects Voldemort to join the Aurors in stopping them. Then he feels Voldemort’s hands on his neck, hears him calling for a healer, and he figures he should have known better.
He lifts a hand to the wound; now that he’s thinking about it, it begins to burn.
“I’m fine,” he says as an afterthought.
Voldemort hushes him, trailing gentle fingers across the edge of the cut. “Don’t speak,” he says, “you’ll aggravate it.”
Harry huffs, but he doesn’t protest as Voldemort leads him to a nearby bench.
As a healer checks his wound and the Aurors give their reports, Voldemort hovers. He looms over Harry, glaring at anyone who stays too close for too long. Harry tolerates it because it’s better than the alternative.
Better to have his lover here, he thinks, than tearing across the countryside in search of bloody revenge for what might have happened.
Later, once they’re home again, Harry lets his lover hold him close. He presses his head to Voldemort’s chest and feels him breathe, listens to the steady beat of his heart. “Tell me you didn’t mean it,” he says, voice soft. He looks up into Voldemort’s eyes and sees nothing like remorse. “Tom, please. All those people… You can’t—"
Voldemort only kisses his forehead. He says, “Then live.”