I told Hermione on Monday morning, before breakfast, in the empty common room.
"You're coming," I said.
She'd had her chin up, ready to argue, and for a second she just looked at me.
"That's it?" she said. "I had a whole speech ready."
"You can save it," I said. "You already told Dumbledore you weren't going to sit in the tower waiting to find out if I was dead. And you're safer next to me than up here on your own."
I'd worked that out at about three in the morning. If tonight went the way I wanted, the man wearing Moody's face was going to feel his Dark Mark fade and know something had gone very wrong, and someone like him would look for leverage before he ran.
Everyone in the castle knew who my girlfriend was. Inside the Infinity, right next to me, she'd be the safest person in Britain, and on her own in Gryffindor Tower she'd be the easiest person in the castle to grab.
"But you're staying inside the Infinity the whole time," I went on, "and you've got one job. If Wormtail turns into a rat, make sure he doesn't get away."
Voldemort and the snake were mine, and nobody else was getting anywhere near either of them. Wormtail was different.
The second anything went wrong for him, he'd turn into a rat and go for the nearest hole, the same way he had in third year, and he'd spent twelve years proving how good he was at it.
Dumbledore would be there, but Dumbledore would also be watching Voldemort and me. Somebody had to be watching the rat.
Hermione thought about it.
"If he changes," she said, "a Full Body-Bind works on animals. It'd stop him before he got anywhere."
"Yeah. That's the plan."
She nodded. Then she sat down on the arm of the sofa, rather suddenly.
"Tonight?" she asked.
"If Dumbledore agrees."
"He'll agree," she said. "He agreed to everything else." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms round them, and we stayed like that until people started coming down for breakfast.
It was one of the longest days I'd had at Hogwarts. In the books, Voldemort got his body back in June, in a graveyard, after a lot of speeches.
I was planning to skip all of that, which meant spending a whole Monday pretending it was a normal Monday. In Charms, Flitwick had us practising Banishing Charms, and Seamus banished his cushion straight through a window.
We had lunch. Hermione ate about three peas.
In the afternoon, Moody had our class for Defence, and I spent the whole hour very carefully not looking at him while his magical eye spun round and round in its socket.
He kept me back at the end, the way he did sometimes.
"You look like you haven't slept, Potter," he growled. "Something keeping you up?"
"Revision," I said.
"Champions are excused exams. Dumbledore made a whole speech about it."
"Nobody's told Hermione. She's been revising at me."
He gave a short bark of a laugh and let me go, but his magical eye stayed on me all the way to the door.
After Defence, I went over the one part of tonight that wasn't going to happen in Dumbledore's office. Barty Crouch Junior had a Dark Mark on his arm, the same as Karkaroff and Snape.
With Hermione out of his reach tonight, the only thing left for him to do once it started fading was run.
So before dinner, I went down to the kitchens and found Dobby.
"Harry Potter wants Dobby to watch a professor?" Dobby's ears went straight up. "All night?"
"Professor Moody. Just his office. If he packs a bag, or tries to leave the castle, come and find me. Wherever I am."
"Dobby will not blink," said Dobby, and I believed him.
That evening, Dumbledore was waiting for us at eight o'clock.
He'd cleared everything off his desk except the silver instruments, which were still puffing away, and Phineas Nigellus had one eye open in his frame again.
"Well?" said Dumbledore.
"Hermione's coming," I said. "If Wormtail turns into a rat, she stops him. You're the one who can turn him back and get him in front of Fudge, and if there's anything in that house we haven't planned for, I want you between it and her. I'll deal with the snake and with him."
"Miss Granger," Dumbledore said, "is this what you want?"
"Yes, Professor."
He inclined his head to her. "And when?"
"Tonight," I said. "Midnight. The castle will be asleep, and nobody will notice we've gone."
"How do you intend to get us there?" he asked. "To Apparate out of the castle, I would have to lift the wards, and I would rather not do that tonight."
"You won't need to," I said. "Elf magic doesn't care about the wards."
Dumbledore's eyebrows went up a fraction, and for the first time since yesterday his eyes did something that was very close to twinkling.
"Then I look forward to it," he said.
Hermione and I went back to the tower to wait, which mostly meant her watching the clock over the fireplace and pretending to read. At ten to midnight we were back in Dumbledore's office, the three of us standing in the middle of the rug, and I put the Infinity up round each of us separately, so it wouldn't matter if we ended up on different sides of a room.
Dumbledore felt it settle. I watched him reach out with one long finger towards the edge of it, curious, until his fingertip stopped a hair's width from nothing at all.
"Remarkable," he murmured.
"Your spells will still get out," I told him. "It just won't let anything in that I don't want in."
Hermione had her wand in one hand and my sleeve in the other. Her face was very white.
I took her hand off my sleeve and held it properly. With my other hand on Dumbledore's arm, I found Voldemort's thread.
It was right there, the way it had been all year. I followed it, and stopped us just short.
We came out in a dark upstairs corridor that smelled of dust and old wood.
The Riddle house had been empty for fifty years apart from the people hiding in it, and it showed.
The wallpaper was peeling. There was a hole in the floorboards near the top of the stairs, and somewhere below us, a window rattled in its frame.
At the end of the corridor, a door stood half open, and firelight was flickering on the wall opposite it.
I could hear voices. One of them was Wormtail's, thin and nervous, saying something about the snake needing milking again before morning.
The other voice was high and quiet, and it made the hair on my arms stand up even though I'd known exactly what it would sound like.
Nagini's thread led into that room, and so did his.
I let go of Hermione's hand. She and Dumbledore followed me down the corridor with their wands out, and I pushed the door open.
It was a big room, the biggest on that floor, with a fire burning in the grate and nothing else much in it except an armchair turned to face the flames.
Wormtail was crouched by the fire with his back to me, holding a small bottle. Nagini was coiled on the hearthrug, all twelve feet of her, and her head came up the second the door moved.
Wormtail turned round. He saw me first, then Dumbledore in the doorway behind me, and he dropped the bottle.
"M-Master," he stammered, backing towards the chair. "Master, it's the boy, it's Dumbledore, they're..."
Then he shrank, mid-sentence. One moment there was a small balding man by the fire, and the next a fat grey rat was scrambling across the hearth towards the corner of the room, where the skirting board had a gap in it.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
Hermione's spell shot past my shoulder from the doorway in a thin streak of light, and the rat went stiff mid-scurry and toppled over on its side with its little legs sticking straight out.
"Got him," said Hermione, and her voice only shook a tiny bit.
Nagini came at me.
She was fast, much faster than anything that size should have been, and she went for my face with her mouth wide open and her fangs out.
She got about an inch from my nose and stopped there, hanging in the air, straining, her whole body bunched up behind her and getting no closer at all.
I didn't give her a second try. I pointed my wand at her and pulled the soul orb into being, right between us, and the piece of Voldemort inside her came out screaming.
The orb took it before it could do anything else. The thread snapped, and Nagini dropped onto the hearthrug in a heap.
She was still alive, though, and still very angry.
"Inferno Glacias."
A short burst of ice-blue fire rolled over her before she could get her head back up, and she lay there under a thin coat of pale ice, not moving.
That made seven, and it left the chair.
"Wormtail?" said the cold voice from inside it. "Wormtail, turn me round. Now."
I walked round the chair myself.
I'd read the description and seen the films, and I'd still have taken either of them over the real thing.
He was small, about the size of a baby, but there was nothing babyish about him.
His skin was dark and raw-looking, and his face was flat like a snake's, with red eyes that fixed on me the moment I came into view.
There was a wand in one of his hands. It was too big for him, and he was holding it up anyway.
"Harry Potter," he said.
The wand jerked up. "Avada Kedavra!"
Green light filled the room, bright enough that the shadow of the chair jumped up the wall behind it.
It stopped a foot from my chest, the same as the snake had, and hung there until there was nothing left of it.
Behind me, wood splintered. Dumbledore had his wand up in the doorway, and three floorboards had ripped up and were hanging in the air by my shoulder, on their way to get between me and the curse. There was nothing left for them to stop. He lowered them back into place, and for once he didn't seem to know what to do with his wand hand.
The red eyes went from my face to the empty air in front of me, and back again.
"What are you?" Voldemort whispered.
He'd have had a lot more to say if I'd let him, and I wasn't breaking my no-speeches rule for the last piece of him. I pulled the orb into being for the last time, and I put everything I had into it, all the magic I'd spent the year holding back so I didn't knock walls down by accident.
The room went heavy with it, and the fire in the grate flattened.
The orb settled over him, and I pulled.
There was nothing left anywhere for him to hold on to. He came out of that small body all at once, screaming, and the orb closed round him and held.
I'd thought about this part as well, and I didn't see any reason to treat the last piece differently from the other six.
He'd torn himself up and hidden bits of himself all over Britain so that he'd never have to die. I wasn't going to leave him anywhere to go.
I closed my hand, and the orb destroyed him the same way it had destroyed the rest. When it faded, there were no threads left at all.
The body in the chair had gone still.
The fire came back up in the grate. The wand had rolled out of the small hand and onto the floor.
Hermione was standing just inside the door with her wand still pointed at the rat.
Dumbledore was beside her, looking at the chair. He had one hand on the door frame, and he was leaning on it.
"It's done," I said.
"Is he..." Hermione stopped and tried again. "Is Voldemort really gone?"
It was the first time I'd ever heard her say his name.
"He's gone," I said. "Properly this time. There's nothing left for him to come back to."
She lowered her wand, very slowly. Then she came across the room, past the chair without looking at it, put her arms round me and held on.
It was only when she did that I noticed my hands were shaking.
Over her shoulder, through the dirty window, I could just make out the dark shape of the churchyard at the bottom of the hill. Nobody was going to die in it in June. Cedric was going to finish the tournament, go home, and probably annoy his dad about it all summer.
I held on to Hermione a bit tighter.
When Dumbledore finally moved, it was to bend down, slowly, and pick up the yew wand from the floor. He held it up to the firelight.
"I have spent more than fifty years," he said, "wondering how this would end."
Then he turned to me. I'd let more magic out in that room than I'd ever let anyone see, and from his face, he'd felt every bit of it.
He put the wand away inside his robes, and then he went over to the corner and looked down at the rat.
"Miss Granger," he said, "that was an excellent Body-Bind."
"Thank you, Professor," Hermione said into my shoulder, without letting go.
Dumbledore did the rest. A flash of blue-white light from his wand, and the rat stretched and grew back into Wormtail, still stiff from Hermione's spell. Thin ropes had wrapped themselves round him before he'd even finished being human again, and Dumbledore stood him upright against the wall like a very unpleasant coat stand.
He said he'd take him straight to the Ministry, where Cornelius Fudge was about to have a very interesting night.
"And the snake?" I asked.
"Leave her with me," Dumbledore said. "Go and get some sleep, Harry. Both of you."
I took Hermione's hand and brought us back to the empty Gryffindor common room, where the fire had burned down to nothing, and somebody had left a half-finished game of Exploding Snap on the table.
She didn't let go of my hand. We sat down on the sofa, and she leaned into my side.
Somewhere in the castle, Snape was probably looking at his arm. So was the man wearing Moody's face, and unlike Snape, he had every reason to panic.
I'd been planning to call Sirius first. He deserved to hear about tonight from me, and he was going to, but it could wait an hour.
A Death Eater who'd spent the whole year pretending to be Mad-Eye Moody wasn't someone I was leaving loose in the castle for one more night, not with a Dark Mark fading on his arm and nothing left to lose.
There was a loud crack, and Dobby was standing on the hearthrug with his ears flat against his head.
"Harry Potter said to come!" he squeaked. "The professor is packing his trunk, sir. Very fast!"
"Is he still in his office?" I asked.
"Yes, sir," said Dobby. "For now."
*
P@treon : Eternal97