The words hung in the air like a curse.
This is Voldemort.
For a long moment, no one moved.
The torches along the walls of the Shrieking Shack flickered, their flames bending unnaturally as if the room itself recoiled from the truth. The silence was so thick Harry could hear the slow drip of blood from the lashes on the floor.
Sirius was the first to react.
He laughed.
It wasn't a mad laugh. Nor a relieved one. It was sharp, disbelieving, edged with something dangerously close to joy.
"Voldemort," Sirius repeated softly, eyes locked on the bound figure. "You're telling me we didn't just catch the rat."
The darklord wearing Peter Pettigrew's skin—opened his mouth.
Harry didn't even look at him.
"Silencio."
The spell snapped into place instantly. Invisible magic crushed around the prisoner's throat, cutting off sound completely. Pettigrew's—Voldemort's—eyes widened in fury as he tried to speak and failed.
Harry turned sharply to Sirius.
"Do not speak to him," Harry said, his voice cold and absolute. "Not a word. He doesn't need spells to hurt you—he uses words better than curses. He will twist your anger, your guilt, your memories."
Sirius's smile vanished.
Remus finally spoke, his voice low and strained.
"Harry… if this is truly Voldemort—"
"It is," Harry cut in.
Remus swallowed. "Then keeping him here is dangerous. Extremely dangerous. Every moment—"
"I know," Harry said calmly.
That frightened Remus more than anything else.
Harry stepped closer to the prisoner, studying him as if examining a failed experiment. Voldemort struggled weakly against the shackles, eyes burning with hatred—but there was something else now.
Fear.
"Fourteen years ago," Harry said quietly, "the wizarding world buried Voldemort. They mourned, celebrated, built myths around his fall. That is how history remembers him."
Harry turned back to Sirius.
"And that is how it should remain."
Sirius stared at him, realization dawning slowly.
"You're saying—"
"There is no trial," Harry said flatly. "No courtroom. No Azkaban. No speeches, no last stands."
Remus's voice trembled. "Harry—"
"We never intended Peter Pettigrew to survive either," Harry continued, unflinching. "So nothing changes."
The shackled figure thrashed harder now, fury and terror boiling beneath the silence charm. He strained so violently the chains rattled against the ceiling beams.
Harry didn't even glance at him.
"Sirius," Harry said, his tone turning almost gentle, "if you want… you can play with him one more day."
Sirius's lips curved into something dark and feral.
"One day," Harry went on. "That's all. After that, I want an owl. Just one sentence."
"That's all I need to know."
Remus took a step forward. "Harry, this is—this is murder."
Harry met his eyes.
"No," he said softly. "This is closure."
Remus flinched.
Harry turned toward the door, already done with the room, the past, the prisoner.
"Oh," he added over his shoulder, voice almost bored, "don't worry about escape. I double checked everything. He can't do magic. He can't transform. And even if he somehow slips the shackles…"
Harry paused.
"…he's in a building full of men who have waited fourteen years for this moment."
The prisoner stared at Harry, eyes wide now—not with rage, but with something far worse.
Recognition.
Harry didn't give him the satisfaction of another glance.
He left the Shrieking Shack the same way he came.
The passage back to Hogwarts was silent.
Harry walked alone, steps steady, breathing even. There was no triumph pounding in his chest. No satisfaction.
Inside his mind, something vast had settled.
Voldemort's knowledge.
Not memories in the emotional sense—Harry had already begun pushing those aside—but structures. Frameworks. Ritual matrices. Spell architectures older than Hogwarts itself.
Dark magic, yes—but also brilliant magic.
Harry would organize it later. Strip away madness. Keep what mattered.
For now, he simply walked.
By the time he emerged onto Hogwarts grounds, the sun was high. Noon bells echoed faintly through the air.
Neville and Hermione spotted him near the steps.
Hermione frowned. "Harry—where have you been?"
Harry shrugged lightly. "Out."
Neville squinted. "You missed History of Magic. And Umbridge's class."
Harry smiled faintly. "Tragic."
They exchanged a look but said nothing.
Harry walked straight past them into the Great Hall, grabbed some food as if nothing extraordinary had happened, and prepared himself for afternoon classes.
The world spun on.
Students laughed. Professors lectured. Umbridge plotted.
And somewhere, in a forgotten house on the edge of the village, the Dark Lord waited to be erased.
The wizarding world would never know how close it had come to seeing him again.
The owl found Harry at breakfast.
It slipped through the open windows of the Great Hall like any other—brown feathers, steady wings, unremarkable enough that no one paid it much attention. It landed in front of Harry's plate with a soft thump, blinking once before extending its leg.
He didn't need to see the handwriting to know.
Slowly, deliberately, he untied the parchment. It wasn't sealed. It didn't carry any mark, any flourish, any pretense.
Just two words, written in a familiar, firm hand.
It's done.
Harry closed his eyes.
And smiled.
It wasn't a grin. There was no triumph in it. It was a quiet, settled expression—like a weight finally lifted from his shoulders, something old and poisonous at last cut out and discarded.
Hermione noticed immediately.
She always did.
"You're smiling," she said suspiciously, peering over her pumpkin juice. "That's… rare. Especially before History of Magic."
Neville looked up too, halfway through buttering his toast. "Yeah. You look… happy."
Harry folded the letter once, then again, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his robes.
"I dealt with one of my enemies," he said lightly.
Hermione's quill paused midair. "Dealt how?"
Harry took a bite of toast, chewed thoughtfully, and shrugged. "Permanently."
Neville choked.
Hermione stared at him, trying to decide whether he was joking. She failed to find any humor in his eyes.
"You're being cryptic on purpose," she accused.
"Of course I am," Harry replied calmly. "If I weren't, you'd overthink it."
That earned him a sharp look, but she didn't press further. Something in his tone—final, settled—made it clear this was a door he wasn't opening.
And so the day went on.
Harry was in an unusually good mood through every class. He answered questions when asked, ignored Umbridge with almost cheerful indifference, and even tolerated History of Magic without once drifting into the mindscape he usually escaped to.
It unsettled people.
By afternoon, whispers followed him through corridors. Students glanced at him, puzzled by the calm confidence in his stride, by the way he seemed lighter somehow.
The news broke just before dinner.
It started as a murmur—Professors speaking in low voices near the staff table, centaurs appearing at the edge of the forest line, Filch scurrying through corridors with unusual urgency.
By the time the announcement reached the Great Hall, the buzz had grown thick with speculation.
Professor McGonagall stood.
Her face was grim.
"Students," she said, voice sharp enough to cut through the noise, "you are not to approach the Forbidden Forest for any reason."
A ripple of unease passed through the hall.
"This afternoon," McGonagall continued, "a body was discovered at the forest's edge."
The word body sent a chill down several spines.
"The deceased has been identified as Peter Pettigrew."
The name hit like a dropped plate.
Harry didn't react.
"Pettigrew," McGonagall went on, "was a known Death Eater. His remains were… partially damaged by wildlife. The matter is being handled by the Ministry."
Dolores Umbridge smiled.
It was small, thin, and entirely unpleasant.
"Let this be a lesson," she chirped, rising slightly from her seat, "that dangerous individuals meet dangerous ends."
Harry finally looked up.
His gaze flicked to Umbridge for half a second.
The smile on her face faltered.
He looked away again.
Dinner resumed in a subdued haze. No one quite knew what to say. Peter Pettigrew—traitor, murderer, coward—was dead. Found like an animal. Left to rot.
Hermione didn't eat much.
Neville didn't either.
They cornered Harry later that night, just outside the Gryffindor common room.
"You did that," Hermione said quietly.
Harry raised an eyebrow. "Did what?"
"Don't do that," she snapped. "You were happy this morning. And now Pettigrew's dead. You expect us not to connect that?"
Neville swallowed. "You hated him, Harry. We all know that."
Harry studied them both.
Hermione crossed her arms. "Did you kill him?"
Silence stretched between them.
Harry didn't answer immediately.
Then, finally, he said, "I didn't."
That wasn't an answer.
Neville exhaled slowly. "But you were involved."
Harry met his eyes. "Yes."
Hermione's jaw tightened. "Harry—"
"No," Harry interrupted gently. "Listen to me. You didn't see anything. You don't know anything. And you're safer that way."
Hermione's voice trembled. "You're talking like this is war."
Harry's expression didn't change.
"It always was."
They stood there, three children carrying secrets far too heavy for their age.
Finally, Hermione looked away.
"We won't tell anyone," she said softly.
Neville nodded. "Never."
Harry inclined his head in thanks.
That night, the Forbidden Forest was quieter than usual.
To the forest, Peter Pettigrew was just another corpse.
To the world, he would be remembered as a Death Eater who met an ugly end.
And Voldemort?
Voldemort had died fourteen years ago.
The Room of Requirement breathed with him.
Harry sat at its center, cross-legged on smooth stone, his wand laid carefully across his knees, his spine straight, his breathing slow and deliberate.
The room had shaped itself to his needs the moment he stepped inside—wide, silent, dimly lit by floating orbs of soft blue light that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Shelves lined the walls, filled with ancient tomes, shattered relics, and half-finished schematics. At the far end stood practice dummies, scorched, cracked, and rebuilt countless times.
But Harry wasn't here to spar.
He closed his eyes and let his mind sink inward.
The memories were still there.
Not screaming anymore. Not clawing. Just… vast.
Voldemort's mindscape had been a labyrinth of obsession—spirals of blood magic, twisted rituals, endless fear of death layered over a brilliant, ruthless intellect. Harry had stripped away the rot first. The cruelty. The compulsive need to dominate. The hunger to be worshipped. He had excised those memories carefully, like cutting out diseased tissue, sealing them away so they would never bleed into him.
What remained surprised him.
Tom Riddle had been terrifying not because of madness—but because of intelligence.
Harry drifted through memory after memory: candlelit libraries buried beneath castles, forgotten vaults beneath deserts, laboratories hidden from both wizard and Muggle worlds. Riddle had studied obsessively—alchemy, transmutation, soul theory, astral physics. Not the childish dream of immortality that the world liked to mock, but the mechanics of permanence. Energy cycles. Conservation of magical force. Conversion of matter into sustained power.
Alchemy.
Harry's pulse quickened slightly.
Gold was never the point. That had been beginner's lore. True alchemy was about balance—about creating a self-sustaining reaction that did not collapse under entropy. Voldemort had been close. Frustratingly close.
"He tried to cheat," Harry murmured under his breath.
By tearing his soul.
Harry inhaled slowly.
With Voldemort's theoretical knowledge and his own understanding of magic, runic engineering, and Force manipulation… the equation changed.
A fuel source.
Something that converted ambient magic, kinetic energy, even stellar radiation—into a stable output.
His lips curved into the faintest smile.
"I can do this," he whispered.
A sudden crack of thunder pulled him back.
Harry opened his eyes just in time to see a bolt of jagged black lightning rip through the air and slam into a reinforced training dummy across the room. The impact shook the chamber. Runes flared. The dummy smoked, its chest cratered inward as arcs of dark energy danced across its surface.
Dobby hovered a few feet off the ground, small hands outstretched, eyes blazing silver-white with focus.
Dobby exhaled sharply and lowered himself back to the floor, wobbling slightly before regaining balance.
Winky clapped her hands excitedly from the sidelines.
"Dobby is getting very strong!" she squeaked proudly. "Very, very strong! Winky thinks Master Harry should be proud!"
Harry stood, rolling his shoulders as he approached.
"That was cleaner than yesterday," Harry said calmly. "Less dispersion at the edges."
Dobby beamed. "Dobby focused more! Master Slytherin says focus is everything!"
Harry didn't correct the name anymore.
He circled the damaged dummy, studying the burn pattern. The Force lightning hadn't merely destroyed—it had disrupted the internal enchantments, unraveling them in a way most spells couldn't.
"That technique is dangerous," Harry said. "Effective. But dangerous. If you lose control—"
"Dobby knows," Dobby said seriously. "Dobby feels it. Like holding a storm in his hands."
Harry nodded. "Good. Respect keeps you alive."
Winky trotted closer, peering at the dummy. "Master Harry, Winky thinks Dobby is learning faster than expected."
Harry glanced back toward the center of the room, where blueprints and alchemical circles floated in the air, half-formed ideas waiting to be solidified.
"He is," Harry admitted. "You both are."
Dobby tilted his head. "Master Harry was thinking very hard."
"I was," Harry said softly.
He looked at the starship schematics hovering nearby—sleek lines, alien geometry, engines still dormant. For the first time in months, the problem didn't feel impossible.
Voldemort had sought eternity for himself.
Harry would use that knowledge to leave this world behind.
"Tomorrow," Harry said, resolve settling into his bones, "we start building the new fuel prototype."
Dobby's eyes widened. "Really?"
"Yes."
Winky gasped happily. "Winky will help!"
Harry returned to the center of the room, lowering himself back into meditation as the elves bustled with excitement.
Above him, ancient knowledge and future ambition began, at last, to align.
Author's Note:
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