Harry ripped open a jagged rift in the fabric of reality, the edges of the tear glowing with a violent, electric violet. They stepped through and came out on a familiar front porch, the front of Grimmauld Place.
"Huh? What are we doing back here?" Hermione asked, blinking as her feet hit the pavement. She looked around, confused by the sudden change in destination.
"I thought you said we were going after the snake? Nagini is with him, isn't she?"
She turned to look at Harry, who stood with his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on some point in the distance that only he could see. He nodded. "Yeah. She is. But you girls aren't coming with me on this one."
"What?!" both girls exclaimed in unison, their voices echoing off the silent townhouses.
"What do you mean we're not coming? You're going in alone? To a nest of Death Eaters?" Tonks demanded, her hair shifting into a sharp, defensive crimson that pulsed with her rising heart rate. "That's suicide. You don't know how many of them are gathered there! It won't be just Voldemort."
'suicide?' he thought to himself as he looked at them. 'After seeing everything, does she really think I'd lose here' he shook his head.
"You are right, this is going to be more dangerous, but for you, not me," Harry told them, his voice dropping an octave. " I can't afford to keep an eye on you when I'm fighting."
Lies. But they didnt need to know.
While it was true he could protect them, Harry had a specific plan for how he wanted this to play out. He wanted to play, and play meant being uninhibited by the need to maintain a "heroic" facade.
Before the girls could even open their mouths to argue, he swiped a hand through the air. A new rift opened. He stepped through and quickly opened and shared his secret. The tear snapped shut behind him before even a single lock of Hermione's hair could follow, leaving the two women standing in the silence of an empty street.
Harry appeared on a grassy hill overlooking an impressive, sprawling manor. Under normal circumstances, the estate would be invisible to anyone not invited, protected by the Fidelius Charms.
But to a Campione, such things were mere cobwebs across a doorway. Harry started walking down the hill, his boots crunching on the frost-covered grass, each step leaving a faint, glowing imprint that hummed with divinity.
He already knew how he was going to take care of this. First, he needed to kill the snake to sever the final anchor. This wasn't really his world, and this wasn't his Voldemort, that man was long dead, his soul scoured from existence in a blaze of solar glory, but Harry had decided to help, and he did not do things by halves. He was not the type to half-ass when dealing with a genocide of monsters.
As he reached the edge of the warded boundary, He barely even stopped for a moment. He passed through the invisible barrier as if it were nothing more than a curtain of smoke, the protections of the Malfoy manor unraveling into nothingness behind him.
He entered the home casually, the heavy oak doors groaning and swinging open. The internal security measures, the suits of armor and gargoyles, remained frozen. He started to roam the ornate hallways. He could feel dozens of heartbeats, some frantic, some calm.
'Good,' he thought, a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth, his eyes glowing with an unholy green light. 'Let's make this quite the show, shall we? A grand finale for a very small, very loud man.'
Voldemort was not feeling well.
He didn't know why, but from the moment the sun had risen, he had started to feel strange. It was a phantom sensation that seemed to come and go throughout the morning.
As the day passed, the feeling had only grown worse, escalating from a dull ache to nausea. Several times, sharp, lancing pains had struck him, yet he could find nothing wrong with you.
Furious and paranoid, he had called his inner circle to the Malfoy estate regarding their past actions. He needed to reassert control, to see the fear in their eyes, to convince himself of his own power.
During his absence, these "loyal" followers had grown content, living like kings while he had scurried in the dirt of Albania like a common rodent. He was here to remind them that they were his property, nothing more than subjects to bring forth his dark will.
He looked around the long, dark table. Lucius Malfoy sat there, pale and trembling. Beside him were the Carrows, Peter Pettigrew, sweating and twitching, Barty Crouch Jr., whose eyes darted around with manic energy, and others like Macnair, Avery, and the Elder Crabbe and Goyle.
The silence was absolute. No one dared to speak.
"Do you have nothing to say for yourselves?" he hissed, the sound like a snake sliding over dry leaves. None dared answer. He had been defeated and cast out, and these fools had spent thirteen years denying him after he gave them everything.
One of the lower-ranked members, a man named Gibbon, opened his mouth as if to offer a stammering platitude. Before the first word finished escaping his lips, Voldemort's wand flicked with the speed of a viper. A jet of green light struck the man square in the chest. He slumped over the table, dead before his head hit the wood.
"Any more excuses?"
None dared move. Voldemort was looking for any reason to vent his inexplicable agony. He was prepared to dish out more punishment when Nagini slithered into the room, her scales dry and rasping against the floorboards. She hissed urgently, her tongue flickering with a terror that Voldemort had never felt from her before.
'Someone is in the castle. A predator.'
Voldemort stiffened. Nagini hadn't seen the intruder, but she felt his gaze, directly onto her soul. Voldemort barked an order at Lucius, demanding he find the interloper. Several Death Eaters rushed out, wands drawn, desperate to find an enemy they could actually understand.
Minutes passed. The Manor remained unnervingly silent. No one came back. He sent two more, including the bloodthirsty Macnair. Still, nothing but a heavy feeling after a while.
Rage flooded Voldemort. How dare someone play with him in his own sanctuary? He was preparing to stand and hunt the intruder himself when the sound of footsteps began to echo.
They weren't the hurried footsteps of someone taking a stroll through their own garden.
The double doors to the drawing-room swung open. Voldemort turned, wand raised, a curse on his lips, expecting to see Dumbledore or someone who had infiltrated to seek him out.
What he didn't expect were three children.
They looked barely old enough to have received their Hogwarts letters, nine, maybe ten years old at most. They stood in the doorway, their expressions blank.
That pause in the Dark Lord's reaction, that split second of pure, unadulterated confusion, was his undoing. Before he could process the absurdity of the sight, the kids raised their hands in perfect unison.
A blast of magic slammed into the room. The massive mahogany table shattered into splinters, and the Death Eaters were sent flying like autumn leaves in a hurricane. They didn't even notice when a rift appeared, and they were sucked into it.
The world blurred. One moment, they were in the manor, and the other, they were here in Diagon Alley. When his vision cleared, he wasn't in the manor. The scent of old wood and stagnant air was gone, replaced by the smell of baking bread, potion ingredients, and the sharp ozone of a crowded street. He was skidding across the stone pavement of Diagon Alley. Voldemort hadn't even felt anything like this before. Just what type of magic was that? One moment he was there and then the next, diagonally alley.
"How...?" he hissed, his mind reeling as he tried to find his footing. 'Just what are they?' he thought to himself. He had devoted himself to not getting hurt.
"Listen up, you snake-faced, pale-skinned, no-nose, bald son of a bitch," the child in the center shouted. He had messy brown hair and eyes that burned with a terrifying, golden inner light. "We are tired of your shit, so today you die."
The black-haired boy beside him nodded, his face a mask of cold, sharp angles that looked far too old for a child. "Yeah. What he said. You're a blight on the scenery. A stain on a perfectly good afternoon. Worms like you should just have stayed in the ground where you belong."
The third boy, a redhead with a dusting of freckles, just yawned and rubbed his eyes, looking as though he'd rather be anywhere else. "Whatever," he muttered, his voice echoing with the boom of distant thunder. "Can we kill him now? I'm hungry, and I think I saw a pie shop down the street."
Voldemort was utterly bewildered, his pride battling with his survival instinct. But before he could think, the first boy leveled a finger at him. A blast of fire erupted, not regular fire, but white hot flames that seemed to have gone out of control. It was a beautiful flame greater than any Fiendfyre Voldemort had ever dared to summon.
Voldemort raised a desperate shield, the heat blistering his skin even through the magical barrier. The commotion immediately drew the attention of every shopkeeper, shopper, and passerby. People peered out from the windows of Flourish and Blotts and the Leaky Cauldron, trying to see the source of the roar, and then the screams started.
"It's him! He's back! Look at the face! It's the Dark Lord!"
Panic rippled through the street like a tidal wave. Witches and wizards scrambled into shops, knocking over displays in their haste to escape the living nightmare. But as the minutes ticked by and the "Dark Lord" failed to instantly kill anyone, curiosity began to win over terror. Some of the braver souls lingered behind pillars and in doorways to watch.
The scene was hallucination-inducing. Three little kids were fighting the Dark Lord and his inner circle, and as unbelievable as it was, the kids were winning.
They watched as the brown-haired child stomped his foot, causing the cobblestones to liquefy and then freeze into massive stone spikes that impaled two Death Eaters through their shoulders, pinning them to the ground like insects in a display case.
The black-haired boy moved with a speed that defied the eye, a blur of motion that dismantled Barty Crouch Jr.'s wand into a dozen pieces with a flick of his fingers before kicking the man through the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
Diagon Alley was treated to the most hilarious and terrifying scene in its thousand-year history, a group of toddlers beating the men and monsters that had plagued Britain for decades.
Harry wanted to laugh. Yes, it was him. Using his Authority, He was doing it for the sole purpose of total humiliation. He wanted Voldemort to die not as a tragic villain or a powerful dark wizard, but as a joke, a man so insignificant that "children" could play with him like a toy.
He watched Voldemort's face, the wide-eyed shock, the bubbling fury, and the dawning, horrific realization that he was being bullied by a child.
It was going even better than he had hoped.
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