The Unlikely Visitor

Chapter 20.
In which Sauron goes for a hands-on approach to the problem.

Perhaps it hadn’t been his best idea ever, doing what Ginny described while she was still describing it… But then, a lot of ideas he had had lately didn’t score too high on his “best ever” list. Apparition was a nauseating, unpleasant affair that made him feel as if he was being squished through a tiny hole and elongated at the same time. It was a rather confusing sensation, so confusing that he didn’t realize at first that he had reached his destination. A screech brought him back to reality.
“Who is THAT?!”
He looked up, and was met with a rather repulsive man. White skin, red eyes, no real nose, and a snarling mouth. Sauron could see why they called him You-Know-Who; he could honestly not think of what to call this type. He seemed corporeal though, so probably he had already performed his ritual to get a body. Sauron also caught sight of completely confused Harry Potter, tied to some sort of monument, and the apparently dead body of another boy. Interesting. He grinned at the dark wizard, eyes glowing dangerously.
“I’m known by many names… You can call me Sauron.”
The man snarled, and a hairy little servant that had been scurrying on the ground around him suddenly mewled.
“Have you come to pledge allegiance to my Lord Voldemort?”
That earned him the magical equivalent of a slap in the face from the wizard, who was apparently named Voldemort. Good, now he at least didn’t have to address the man as “You-Know-Who”. Sauron chuckled.
“I don’t pledge allegiance to anyone lesser than myself.”
Voldemort’s voice was cold.
“You dare insult me? Wormtail, kill him. We’ll see who is lesser…”
The servant produced a wand and aimed at Sauron, exclaiming a killing curse that he easily dodged. The Maia grinned. How amusing. What was it with groveling idiots serving weak wizards, and the prefix “worm”?
“Experience proves that I tend to be hard to kill, even for people who can aim.”
He flicked his wand, not even needing to pronounce the curse, and fire enveloped Wormtail, making the man scream in utter agony while the flames devoured him.
“Now, can we talk without you trying to separate my fëa from this body? I’ve grown rather fond of it lately.”
Meanwhile, the demonic flames had quickly eaten all of Wormtail, except what appeared to be a metal hand-prosthesis. Voldemort seemed both angered and baffled. Sounding honestly curious he asked,
“What are you?”
Sauron shrugged.
“That doesn’t matter much. I’m not here to discuss myself.”
Voldemort opened his mouth to answer, when suddenly a series of popping sounds resounded, and the dark place filled with other people. More servants, Sauron guessed from the way they looked. He waved his wand again, and a circle of fire surrounded them before they could even reach for their wands.
“If you don’t want your servants to die like that one over there…” he pointed at the ashy remains of Wormtail, “Tell them not to try and leave the circle.”
Sauron enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed it; the feeling of power the whole situation gave him was exquisite…
“If you think a little fire will deter them…” Voldemort growled at the new arrivals. “Prove your loyalty to me!”
One attempted to apparate out of the circle immediately, but flames surrounded him before he could do anything, making his screams echo through the place. Sauron smirked.
“As I said, if you don’t want them to die, tell them to stay put. This is between you and me.”
“What exactly do you hope to reach with this?! Controlling the fire will exhaust you. Do you honestly believe you can beat me in a duel?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
Voldemort took a wand from his robes, snarling at Sauron still, but a little apprehensive already. He himself had a good control of Fiendfyre, but this strange wizard named Sauron was admittedly brilliant with it… not to mention that he seemed to have no qualms with murdering people. No matter what he had said, Voldemort knew the man would be a formidable opponent.
“We shall see.”
Dodging another killing curse with a physically challenging back-bend, Sauron rolled his eyes.
“Can we just accept that this is not going to work?” He sighed. “Let’s say, for every killing curse I dodge, I get to kill one of your servants. Maybe that’ll change your mind.”
He promptly added deed to the word, and the fiendish flames of the circle wrapped themselves around one of the other death eaters, scorching and burning him while his wails filled the air. Voldemort realized he was stuck, and lowered his wand.
“What is it you want to discuss?”
Sauron glared, a vicious smirk around his lips.
“I heard you like little girls.” Voldemort’s red eyes widened in surprise, and Sauron couldn’t help but snicker internally at the man’s expression. He continued, “In particular, one little girl that I’ve grown rather fond of. I wasn’t pleased to hear that you apparently tried to have her soul for dinner.” Voldemort didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. Sauron rolled his eyes. “Red hair, rather small posture, feisty attitude, curses in Black Speech like a drunken orc but can’t write legible Tengwar to save her life? Sounds familiar?” Voldemort eyed him suspiciously.
“I don’t know what you speak of.”
Most unusual… Sauron frowned.
“Strange. I was rather certain that was you, disguised as a diary. Which is -as far as corporeal manifestations go- a rather impractical disguise, by the way. Even my worst wasn’t that bad, I could at least see something.” Then he grinned at Voldemort in a most menacing manner. “Speaking of seeing…”
Before Voldemort could do anything, Sauron focused his glowing eyes on him, and a mental attack attempted to break through his defenses. He didn’t get in immediately, after all Voldemort was a skilled Occlumens, but when a powerful Maia really wants to see in your mind there’s not much you can do to stop him. A little later, Sauron shifted freely through memories and thoughts, occasionally chuckling as Voldemort growled, powerless to stop him.
“This is ironic. A ring, really? Evil minds think alike, apparently.”
“Get out of my mind!”
“Hmm… Interesting…”
The dark wizard tried a couple futile attempts to block him from seeing certain things, but that only drew his attention to those things. Sauron was starting to see what Voldemort had done, and why he didn’t know anything about the diary’s activities. It was hard to keep track of what a piece of your soul did after you had cut it off from yourself, after all. He knew that well enough; if it were easy he would never have lost track of his Ring. Not that the thing had been a piece of his soul, exactly… Perhaps it was, he suddenly mused. After all, the body he had gotten when falling out of the Void missed a finger, meaning that his fëa was fundamentally incomplete… There was more to it, but the mind of an enemy wasn’t really the best place to overthink such things, he decided. He knew enough for now, and retreated from the wizard’s mind. Voldemort was experiencing some sort of post-violent-legilimency-shock, it seemed; his red eyes had glazed over slightly and he didn’t immediately respond to Sauron’s leaving. The Maia didn’t hesitate to make use of the distraction. Perhaps he should have killed the wizard, but for some reason that wasn’t what he did. Instead he grabbed the silver prosthesis from the ground, studied it for a moment, and right when Voldemort woke up from his trance he swung his sword and cut off the wizard’s wand-hand, which brought his amount of collected hands on two. Sudden fire blazed as a wall between the screaming Voldemort and him, keeping the wizard and his servants away from him and the still-chained Harry Potter. The boy appeared to be in a state of shock. Holding both the silver hand and the bleeding, scaly one from Voldemort, he cut the ties that bound Harry to the stone statue.
“Y-You… W-Why…”
Sauron shrugged.
“I don’t really know. I just thought to help Ginny a hand. She likes you, for some reason.” He caught Harry staring at the hands he was holding, and rolled his eyes. “Pun not intended. Now, who’s the dead guy?”
“C-Cedric…”
Sauron knew that whatever he could say about Cedric Diggory, it would probably not please Harry, and for once he had the wisdom to hold his tongue.
“Can you carry him? I sort of have my hands full.” Again, that stare. “Pun. Not. Intended.” Irmo would love this. If the Vala of Dreams could see this, he would probably disincarnate from laughter. Sauron could see the amusement value as well, but since he had one dead guy, one shell-shocked guy, and a bunch of angry wizards behind a wall of fire on his hands, he decided to keep the laughter for a later time.
“Any idea how we get back to Hogwarts?”
Harry pointed at the discarded Triwizard Cup.
“It’s a portkey…”
“Great. You ready?”
“W-what about Voldemort?”
“He can make himself a nice new hand. The fire will disappear after we’ve gone… or it will devour them all, I’m not sure. Either way, it won’t be our problem anymore.”
“You… you b-burned them…”
“My methods may be unorthodox, but they work, don’t they?”
Harry hesitated, a look of complete shock and terror in his eyes. Eventually Sauron sighed.
“Eru, I don’t understand how you have ever slain a basilisk, really.”
Sauron grabbed Harry by the wrist, not caring that the boy’s hand touched with his “trophies”, and grabbed the cup. In a flash, they arrived back at Hogwarts, where immediately a tumult broke loose at the sight of not one, but three arrivals, of which one dead and one not allowed to be there. Sauron dropped Harry and Cedric, and walked with great strides to the Jury Table. With a sickening “splotch” he dropped the scaly hand of Voldemort right in front of Dumbledore. Dryly he remarked.
“Bad news. Voldemort is back.”
Making that announcement was another action ranked high on the list of “things he should not have done.” There was screaming, crying, yelling, and other loudness that Sauron just wasn’t really prepared for. Standing there, bloody and slightly overwhelmed, he suddenly heard a familiar voice over all the ruckus.
“Sauron Gorthaur! Lat lûk kruf-ob! Lat hag bagthroqûg! Olog pushdug!”
Heads turned, and Ginny -a very bloody, limping Ginny who supported on her spear- approached them. She glared daggers at Sauron.
“How DARE you leave me alone like that!?”
“Err…”
“I was worried SICK! I thought you had splinched yourself! You could have ended up anywhere, for all I knew! In the mountains of Uruguay! Or in Antarctica!”
There was something bizarre about being scolded by a girl half your size and but a fraction of your age… Especially when she called you a whore's son, a stinking troll, and a shit-eating bastard. He raised an eyebrow at her.
“What did you do?”
She frowned.
“What does it look like I did? I tried to find the way back out, of course! Those damn redcaps wouldn’t leave me alone until I killed them all! Not to mention the burning stones, or the Sphinx, or that damn mist trap! And all that, Sauron Gorthaur, because I was worried about YOU!”
It was a bizarre feeling indeed… Surprisingly enough, Sauron felt not a speck of anger at Ginny. He grinned uncharacteristically.
“I saved your love interest though. And I got you revenge.”
That was the point where Ginny became more aware of her surroundings. And with every bit she became aware she paled more. Eventually she just fainted. Great response that was… Sauron caught her, while he closed his eyes and silently cursed the Valar. He had braved a cantankerous hat, Monster-Crab-Scorpions, bloodthirsty dwarves, accidental teleportation, Fiendfyre, and an -albeit inferior- dark lord… but something told him that his problems were only just beginning…

Harry, Ginny, and Cedric’s body were brought to the sickbay, and Sauron got to brave the headmaster and some other officials for a major Third Degree, not even given the time to get rid of all the blood on him. A lot of things were not in his favor, beginning with the body of Barty Crouch Junior, found hanging from the Astronomy Tower… However, the potion in the man’s pocket flask turned out to be polyjuice potion that changed one into Alastor Moody, which somewhat confirmed Sauron’s story, and as for his announcement of Voldemort’s return, it was hard to deny the physical evidence he had so kindly brought with him. Cherry on the pie was the information he had gained from Voldemort’s mind though… What he knew about the dark lord’s horcruxes, the victims used for each one, and the places Voldemort had hidden them not only proved his story, it also was invaluable information in the fight against the man. In all honesty, Sauron had just shifted through the wizard’s mind out of curiosity, but the information became his rescue. After a five-hour interrogation, he was released at last, although Dumbledore wanted to see him first thing in the morning. Sauron truly couldn’t care less. For all the battles and all the dirt he had braved in his long life, he didn’t think he had ever longed for a hot shower more than he did now…

“Sauron…”
When he came out of the bathroom, barely keeping his eyes in focus from exhaustion, a pleasant surprise was waiting for him on his bed. Sinistra. The astronomy professor had come to see him... For a moment he thought he was already dreaming, but then she jumped up and embraced him before he could even say something. He didn’t trust his eyes, but the magic of her touch couldn’t lie, she was truly there. He slumped against her, surrendering to her caress instinctively. She led him to the bed and he didn’t even try to resist. He was so tired… Her hands raked through his hair, and vaguely he saw her smile, and her obsidian eyes, as through a mist.
“My beloved… I am so proud of you.”
Her words resonated warmly, and Sauron found himself smiling despite everything. He whispered.
“I love you, Sinistra… I would… ask for your hand… but that may not be such a good idea… given the connotation…”
She held a finger to his lips, but he could hear the smile in her voice.
“Sssh… be quiet. You should not make such decisions now. You’re too tired.”
He was, he really was. Sinistra’s hands softly stroked his skin, making his thoughts fade into background noise. She started singing a calming song in that strange African language of hers, and he willingly surrendered to sleep in her arms, his consciousness slipping away in the magic of the tune…
“Sweet dreams, my beloved… I will watch over you…”

(Author's Apologies)

TRANSLATIONS:
Lat lûk kruf-ob! = You son of a whore!
Lat hag bagthroqûg! = You shit-eating bastard! (bag = shit, throquat = to eat/devour, -ug = suffix for present participle)
Olog pushdug! = Stinking troll!

So, we get a lot of hands. Sauron has a hand in that, duh. More than one, even. He'll have a lot of trouble on his hands now...I also wonder how many hand puns I can stuff into the Author's Apologies without sounding like a complete moron. (That number would probably be zero. Unfortunately. I always sound like a moron in the Author's Apologies.)
Feedback is always appreciated!