Dabbling With The Dark

Chapter 33

He didn't reply backing up healing his hand once enough of his blood had dripped onto the bracelet to make it glow an eerie shade of green. Slowly, the bracelet floated in the air, a cloud of swirling black smoke beneath it. Everyone around the bed knelt lowering their heads, but he just stood there waiting as the cloud began to solidify into the clear shape of legs and a torso and arms and shoulders and a head. And once the cloud started to fade away, a pale face with narrow red slits for eyes took focus directed at him.

"Before you start cursing me with Crucios again, let me explain," he said holding up his hands palms out in a defensive posture.

"Potter," Voldemort seethed.

"Harry," he said. "It's been Harry since I was sixteen and it still is or you wouldn't be back right now. Just please hear me out," he said. The realization that he was alive flickered across Voldemort's face and it gave him the opening he needed.

"The Prophecy had to be played out to the end. You know that or you wouldn't have spent so many years trying to kill me. It has been now. 'Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live whilst the other survives.' I told you the whole thing years ago. Not neither as in one or the other but as in each of the two. You killed me, I killed you, we both lived for at least a few minutes with the other dead so the Prophecy has been fulfilled and doesn't affect us anymore." Dumbledore gasped and he turned and looked at the old man.

"Never thought about that, did you? Of course you didn't. You interpreted the Prophecy the way you wanted it to play out, not in every way it could have been. 'The power that the Dark Lord know not' wasn't love; it was that I could sense the other Horcruxes and he couldn't because they weren't a connected part of him anymore, but being a Horcrux made me connected to them. And the Prophecy said 'The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches'; not the one who would do that permanently."

"You did vanquish him-" Dumbledore said still gasping with a hand clutching his chest.

"Because you made me fucking have to!" he yelled back. "Fuck, I had to picture him being you just to work up enough intent to actually land the fucking curse on him. Everyone in this room except you knows that killing him was the last thing that I really wanted to do." Dumbledore looked around the room and he did, too, at everyone still knelling.

"My Lord, if you'll allow me to speak-" Hermione said, but Voldemort cut her off.

"How dare you speak to me, Mudblood!" Voldemort seethed.

"Not the Mudblood I appear to be, my Lord," Hermione said and held up her left arm pulling up her sleeve. "Your summons has the power to neutralize the Polyjuice." Voldemort looked away from her at him again and he reached into his inside robe pocket and pulled Voldemort's wand from it.

"Harry, please-"

"Oh, shut up," he said, flicked his wand at Dumbledore with a silencing charm, and held out Voldemort's towards the man handle-side out. He knew it was coming, but that didn't make hitting the ground in the throws of the Cruciatus any less painful.

"Do not move," Voldemort said. He nodded panting and watched from the floor as Voldemort walked over to Hermione. "Should you be lying to me know that your death is soon in coming."

"Yes, my Lord," Hermione said still holding up her arm.

He watched from the floor as Voldemort touch the tip of his wand to her forearm. The Dark Mark reappeared along with her face shifting and contorting, her hair color changing from brown to black streaked with white. Voldemort grinned looking around the room as every other 'Order' member around the room transformed into their true Death Eater selves with their Dark Marks returning as brightly as ever.