Dobby the House-Elf and Voldemort (5)

A low, hoarse voice rang directly inside Lucius's mind.

It had not entered through his ears. It had simply appeared in the depths of his consciousness, like a drop of ink falling into a bowl of clear water, spreading soundlessly and irreversibly.

"Lucius."

Just two words.

Yet Lucius's body suddenly tensed.

Those two words were not calling his name. They were reminding him—I have always been watching you.

"That lowly insect's 'performance' was passable."

Lucius's jaw tightened slightly. He knew whom Madara meant. Dobby. That House-Elf who wore a tattered pillowcase, spoke in a muddled way, and was always tugging at his own ears. The "defective product" Lucius had treated like garbage, one he had not even considered worth brainwashing. The useless fool he had thought too stupid and too worthless to deserve any effort.

"As expected, it leaked the 'script' we deliberately displayed to the Boy Who Lived without missing a single detail."

There was no emotion in Madara's voice, but every word was like an ice spike driven into Lucius's skull from above, piercing his cranium, piercing his meninges, and embedding itself deep within his thoughts. Lucius's hand clenched faintly, his fingers curling as though grasping at something invisible.

He understood now. Dobby was not some "fish that had slipped through the net."

Dobby had been "let out."

The reason that elf had been able to retain "a little of its own thoughts" was not because Lucius, its master, had been too busy to deal with it. It was because Lord Madara needed it to retain them. He needed it to believe it was free, that it was "taking a risk," that it was doing something "right" against its master's wishes.

Only then would Dobby's words be believed. The intelligence of a brainwashed House-Elf, one utterly obedient to