"You're staying here," I told Hermione.
"No," she said, "I'm not," and she already had her wand out.
I could have argued. But the whole reason she'd come to Little Hangleton was that she was safer next to me than anywhere else in the castle, and that was even more true now than it had been an hour ago.
The Infinity was still up round her. I checked it, just to be sure, and then I took her hand.
"Dobby, go back to his corridor and keep watch," I said. "If anyone else comes, don't let them in."
"Dobby will not let a mouse in, sir!"
We came out in the corridor outside Moody's office.
The door was shut, but there was light under it, and I could hear someone moving around inside quickly, the clunk of a wooden leg and drawers being yanked open.
There was a Foe-Glass on the wall in there that showed you your enemies getting closer, and he'd have seen two shadowy shapes in it by now.
I didn't knock. The door was locked, with a couple of nasty jinxes laid over the lock, and it took me a second or two to take them off and push it open.
The office was a mess. Half the drawers were hanging open, and there was a big trunk standing in the middle of the floor with its lid up, the one with seven locks down the front.
Moody was standing over it with something half-stuffed into the top compartment, but he'd already turned to face the door by the time it swung open, and both his eyes, the real one and the magical one, were fixed on me.
"Potter," he growled. "It's past midnight. What are you doing out of bed?"
"Hello, Barty," I said.
His face didn't change, but his wand came up so fast I barely saw it move, straight past me and at Hermione.
"Crucio!"
The curse hit her Infinity a foot from her face and stopped, crackling, and then there was nothing left of it. Hermione flinched anyway.
I'd known he'd try for her. That was the whole point of keeping her next to me, and my hands still went cold.
"Expelliarmus."
His wand flew out of his hand and clattered into the corner before he'd worked out what was happening.
I turned the rug under his feet into chains and wrapped them round him from his ankles to his shoulders, and he went over sideways and hit the floor with a thud.
The hip flask was on the desk. "Accio." It smacked into my palm.
"You'll be wanting this soon," I said. "You're not getting it."
He stopped struggling. He looked up at me from the floor with Moody's scarred face, the magical eye still spinning, and smiled in a way the real Moody never would have.
"He's gone, isn't he?" he whispered. "I felt it. My arm. You did that. You."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
He laughed, a cracked little sound. "Then I'm the last one. The only one who stayed loyal to the end. He'd have honoured me above all of them, he'd have..."
"Silencio."
His mouth went on moving for a second before he realised nothing was coming out of it.
I'd spent the whole year letting him stand at the front of our classroom, teaching us curses and watching me with that eye, because it was the smart thing to do, and it had worked. Looking at him on the floor, I still didn't enjoy remembering it.
Hermione hadn't moved from the doorway.
"Harry." Her voice had dropped almost to nothing. "That's Professor Moody."
"It isn't," I said. "It's Barty Crouch's son. He's been drinking Polyjuice Potion all year."
"The insider," she said. "The person who put your name in the Goblet."
"Yes."
"In March, you told Sirius and me you didn't know who it was."
"I didn't, not for certain," I said. "I'd started to suspect him, because nobody tried harder to help me win the tournament than he did, and that didn't make any sense for Mad-Eye Moody. Then I checked the Marauder's Map yesterday, and it didn't say Alastor Moody in his office. It said Bartemius Crouch Junior."
She looked down at the man on the floor, the one who'd taught her Defence all year.
"Where's the real one?"
I went over to the trunk.
It took a minute to work through all seven locks. The first few compartments were stuffed with spellbooks and spare robes.
The seventh opened onto a pit about ten feet deep. At the bottom of it, curled up on the stone, was an old man so thin his robes hung off him, with a chunk of hair hacked off one side of his head and no wooden leg at all.
"Is he...?" Hermione asked from behind me.
"He's alive," I told her. "Crouch needed him alive for the Polyjuice."
"Mobilicorpus." I floated him up as gently as I could and laid him on the floor. His real eye opened, slowly, and found me. It took a moment to focus.
"Who're you?" he croaked.
"Harry Potter," I said. "You've been in a trunk since the start of September, Professor. I'm sorry it took this long."
His eye wandered off me to the man in the chains on the floor next to him, still wearing his face, and narrowed.
"Constant vigilance," he rasped, mostly to himself. "Should've... known."
Hermione was already kneeling next to him with a blanket she'd pulled off the back of a chair. Her hands were shaking badly enough that it took her two goes to tuck it round him.
"Dobby," I called.
He popped into the doorway at once.
"Can you fetch Professor McGonagall? And Professor Snape. Tell Professor Snape to bring Veritaserum."
Dobby vanished with a crack.
McGonagall arrived first, a few minutes later, in a tartan dressing gown with her hair in a long plait, and she stopped dead in the doorway.
I didn't blame her. There was a Mad-Eye Moody wrapped in chains on the floor and another one under a blanket being looked after by Hermione, and I was standing in between them holding a hip flask.
"Potter," she said. "What on earth is going on?"
"It's a long story, Professor," I told her. "The short version is that one of them's real and the other one put my name in the Goblet of Fire."
Snape came in a minute later, holding a small glass bottle. He was pale and very quiet, and he had his left arm pressed tight against his side.
"Potter," he said. "My arm stopped hurting at a quarter past twelve. Would you happen to know why?"
"You should ask Professor Dumbledore," I said.
For once, I didn't trip him into anything.
The man in the chains started to change while McGonagall was still trying to get a sensible answer out of me.
The scars faded first, and the nose filled out. His hair shortened and went the colour of straw. The magical eye dropped out of its socket and rolled away across the floor, and then there was a pale, freckled young man in the chains who looked nothing like Moody at all.
McGonagall went white. "Barty Crouch," she whispered. "But he died in Azkaban."
"He didn't," I said.
I picked the magical eye up from where it had rolled and put it in the real Moody's hand. His fingers closed round it.
Dumbledore came back from the Ministry just before one.
He took it all in from the doorway, and I could have sworn he almost laughed.
"I leave you alone for one hour, Harry," he said.
"He was packing," I said.
Dumbledore's eyes went to the real Moody under Hermione's blanket, and the almost-laugh went out of his face.
He knelt by Moody first and said something to him too quietly for me to hear. Then he stood up and turned to Snape.
Whatever passed between the two of them, Snape's shoulders came down an inch.
It was nearly two by the time McGonagall sent us back to the tower. Dumbledore had Crouch, and Pomfrey had come up for Moody. Nobody needed two fourth-years for any of it.
Hermione held my hand all the way back. On the stairs below the Fat Lady, she spoke for the first time since we'd left the office.
"He went for me first," she said. "You were the one standing in front of him, and he went for me."
"Yes."
"That's why you wanted me with you tonight."
"That was most of it," I said. "I should have told you all of it this morning."
Her fingers tightened round mine. I gave the Fat Lady the password, and she swung open for us, grumbling about the hour.
The common room was still empty, and the Exploding Snap game was where we'd left it.
Hermione sat down on the sofa, and I dropped down next to her. After a minute, she put her head on my shoulder.
"Call Sirius," she said. "He's waited long enough."
I took the mirror out of my pocket.
"Padfoot," I said.
It took a while. When Sirius's face finally appeared, it was creased from his pillow and squinting.
"Harry?" he mumbled. "It's the middle of the night. What's happened?"
"Voldemort's dead," I said. "And Dumbledore's just taken Wormtail to the Ministry."
Sirius stopped squinting.
*
P@treon : Eternal97