A crime to outlive him

A CRIME TO OUTLIVE HIM

By F.P.Barbieri

Part 1

Lucius Malfoy was looking around himself in angry bewilderment. Something - a whole host of somethings - was going wrong. Borne by the waves of victory, Lord Voldemort's servants had swept into the castle gates; the traitor Snape lay below, broken, bleeding and near to death; and yet, suddenly, they had known that they were no longer in control. The dragon had vanished; the enchanted beasts were running out of control; and louder and louder, a rumble could be heard around them, that presaged nothing good.

Suddenly a stone wall folded aside like a curtain. The Weasley family, whom he had left for dead five miles away, were standing there, crackling with power, their faces so filled with wrath that their red hair seemed to burn. As he turned to face them, the wall behind him opened in turn, and a whole flock of wizards came storming in. One of them engaged Crabbe senior physically... something that would have been suicide for most, for Crabbe, though slow of wits and reaction, was physically as strong as a bull. But his enemy... short, stumpy, apparently chubby... exploded in a flurry of blows, driven by a vindictive fury so intense that it poured out of him in crimson waves. Against him, Crabbe stood no chance; but even before he had finished falling, and just as the Weasleys began striking as one, the short and chubby demon jumped over him, looking for the one person who was his prey.

Things were happening too fast. As Lucius and his wife, together with the bulk of his followers tried to hold back the Weasleys, the ceiling was ripped open; and an instant later, the whole floor shook, as Hagrid and Grawp jumped in, looking for Death Eaters to destroy. And now panic began to spread among Voldemort's followers. Some broke and ran; only to find themselves stumbling and crashing all over each other, falling in a tangled and aching mess of limbs before the stern faces of Minerva McGonagall and Hermione Granger, who had been placed in the corridor to make sure that nobody could escape the trap.

Bellatrix had followed less of events than Lucius; standing between her sister Narcissa and her husband Rudolphus Lestrange, she had concentrated wholly on resisting the Weasleys - suddenly, she felt her head being jerked back by the hair. She stumbled backwards; and a fist smashed into the corner of her jaw and throat, sending her sprawling and shrieking to the ground. She dazedly saw a short, tubby-looking figure above her; she just managed to recognize Neville Longbottom; but she was too woozy to realize that what had once been puppy fat was now a solid, squat block of muscle, trained to stone hardness over months just in hope that she might fall to him in the final battle.

Bellatrix never had the chance to recover; the avenger had no intention of giving her a break. The word "CRUCIO" rang around her - and every cell of her body exploded in pain. Neville was hitting with the fury of years of grief and hatred, hitting harder than even Voldemort ever had; hitting with the intention of breaking her, of not allowing her any dignity at all, to make her crawl and beg. In just a few seconds, it happened: she was shrieking and writhing on the ground, her body jerking out of control, imploring him, don't, don't, please stop, stop, stop for just one second, just one second...

Bellatrix' screams broke what was left of the Death Eaters' spirit. Most of them threw themselves at the victors' feet, begging for mercy; Lucius, Narcissa and a few others tried to run off into the corridors....

...only to come to a sudden, terrified, silent halt. A single figure was striding up the main staircase - or rather, two, for a second glimpse showed the tall ghost by his side. Harry Potter, an adult now, tall and hardened by years of clashes and training, with the ghost of Albus Dumbledore towering above him like a divinity shedding blessing. Harry kept walking, hardly looking at the dishevelled and terrified Malfoys. He strode through the hall, where Neville watched him with a grim smile on his face, and released Bellatrix - only to weigh her with magical chains, and to drag her after him as he turned and followed The Boy Who Lived. And as Harry still strode ahead, the giants and the wizards, the victors and their prisoners, came one after the other after him; even Grawp turning his dull little eyes in his huge stone head, with a mixture of fear and fascination, on the young man and the ghost, and lumbering after.

Harry climbed a circular staircase and came to an entranceway where a door hung off its hinges. He entered. Once this had been the office of Albus Dumbledore, then of Minerva McGonagall; and both were by his side when he entered and faced the thing that had come to pollute it. It sat at the Headmaster's desk, tall and white and corpse-like, longer and thinner than any human being should be, alone except for the snake Nagini; and its eyes flashed as it saw its enemies enter.

"Ill met, Harry Potter. This is the day you die," it said as it half rose from its seat; but the young man remained calm.

"No, Thomas Riddle," he answered, "you do. You are already dead, and do not know it."

A terrible flash of comprehension came over Voldemort as six objects floated before Harry Potter, one after the other; a locket, a cup, a medallion, a ring, a dirty old diary, and a single gold coin. He did not need to be told to know that these were his Horcruxes, and that they were now disenchanted, empty of those irreplaceable pieces of soul; or that he was on the verge of death.

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It was only afterwards, that Harry and Minerva McGonagall, consulting with Hermione, Arthur and Bill Weasley, and a number of other wizards and witches, could work out what Lord Voldemort had done with the last few instants of his life; at the time, they only saw him act. But as they examined his actions later, they realized that he must have somehow slowed the flow of time around himself, to grant himself a few precious seconds. Harry Potter cast the Avada Kedavra, and Voldemort knew that he could neither avoid it nor survive it. But those few seconds allowed him to cast a Finite Incantem of extraordinary force, strong enough to break some of the strongest spells that he himself had ever cast.

Lord Voldemort seemed to move like a blur; then he fell, clattering over the Headmaster's chair and to the ground, as his flesh withered and started smelling foully, of the death he had carried in himself for decades. His wand flew away from his hand, broke into a thousand pieces, and exploded in a burst of fire that swiftly scattered into ashes. But the snake Nagini suddenly fell from the column around which she had coiled herself, to the granite flagstones beneath; her long tail seemed suddenly to shorten, then to burst in two; arms, a trunk, a human head suddenly appeared where a great python had been, only a moment before, as a sinister shrieking noise announced the end of a great spell. Giants, Death Eaters, wizards, witches, they all saw it: a young woman lay on the floor, breathing heavily as if exhausted, wearing the tattered rags of robes in the fashion of twenty years earlier. She lifted her head, and they saw the red hair and green eyes. And then her eyes focused on the tall, slim, messy-haired figure before her, and she opened her lips and spoke.

"James..?"