There was a great space cleared, and silence maintained, and if you looked away for an instant you could tell what this hall was on a normal day. The Gryffindor banner hung tattered and ripped by errant spells, the Slytherin one even more so. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw had fallen somewhere to the floor, hidden behind masses of feet and all but forgotten.
And the Lord and his Enemy stood more silent than all, and looked at nothing but each other. For the one was thinking, surely there will be yet another impossible escape, but how can there be? And the other was thinking, oh god oh god oh god holy fuck I'm doomed again.
But he showed none of it, and made his face a mask, and it was in this manner too that he spoke, as if the mask itself were choosing his words.
"I won't ask anyone not to help me," he said, "because if there's anything I've learned in this adventure, I can't do everything alone."
Voldemort smiled on the outside. "An interesting strategy, professing your weakness before a duel. Are you hoping for pity, Potter?"
"Not at all. I would be stupid to think you were still capable of a thing like that. Even if you felt it, you would suppress it." Icy was his voice, and sharper his vision. He was starting to see the path, and understand the intentions of that part of his mind that was currently speaking. And slowly he and it merged, for they were parts of a single person after all, and then Harry knew what he was doing.
"All along my journey," spake Voldemort's Enemy, "I've relied on my friends, and that's as it should be. Even though they sometimes have to get hurt for me-I don't like it but it's necessary for the greater good."
Voldemort couldn't let that slip past. "So, your plan, as always, is to let them be hurt for you some more. I would be lying to call myself surprised. Who will it be this time, Harry? The woman who all but took you in, called you her s-"
"NO!"
A voice like thunder, coming from the boy and yet not. What?
And he realized it was not Harry's voice alone but many, somehow synchronized, organized. This that the Death Eaters had always had and the Wizarding World had never managed: unity, a name to rally around. In a moment of terrible clarity he saw the Boy Who Lived as he should have all along-
A filter over his vision, one figure stands out in brightest green, and the others are bolstered by his presence-
"Avadakedavra" he hissed, it was less than a second. Green blazed from the Elder Wand and Harry tensed in panic (yes!) and then a figure leaped from the crowd in front of it and shattered and crunched onto the ground and slid. Shrieks came from the audience.
And Harry looked, and it was an empty suit of armor.
He let out a laugh then, unable to help it and not sure if he should. Professor Minerva McGonagall winked from the crowd. Harry turned back to Tom Riddle.
"I intend no one to die for me," he uttered with all confidence, "never again as long the combined forces of Light can help it."
And the Dark Lord proclaimed, high and cold, "A Hogwartian combatant has interfered in our duel. Let the battle resume."
There was an explosion of sound and motion, a tumult erupted around, there were flashes of light then and flying stone and people, and Harry wasted not a second for no one else need die for him.
"You understand unity, but not friendship!" he screamed over the sounds of magical fighting. He could no longer see the Dark Lord, moving bodies blocked the way, bodies and so much light. "My friend Ron battled his own worst fears to destroy pieces of your soul! He fought his way alone to return to us when he realized how much our friendship meant to him! He represents the Elder Wand!"
Voldemort felt nothing, certainly no change in allegiance from his wand. This magic, then, was not working, if indeed it was magic and not some strange rallying cry. He slid forward through the crowd, slashing through enemies with all ease. He had to find the boy and end it, or Harry Potter was going to get away again somehow...
He could follow the voice.
"My friend Hermione tirelessly laid protective enchantments around us at every campsite! She engineered a brilliant plan to break into the Ministry unseen and had she not done so much to hide us from danger we would be dead many times over! She represents the True Invisibility Cloak!"
In the middle of the fray Harry couldn't think, couldn't plan, not anymore because all that mind space was taken up by writing his speech and delivering it. He had to get the words into people's minds, or maybe only Voldemort's, the magic worked on understanding...
"And I, I have defied Death countless times, and nearly always to help another! I have come back after all hope for me was lost, again and again, until I finally died for real and came back anyway! I represent the Resurrection Stone! You knew that to combine the three would allow you to master Death, but you never understood! You collected the objects themselves, as pale an imitation of the real thing as the ghosts the Stone really brings back! What you never got, Lord Voldemort-"
And there he was, yelling out ridiculous things in the midst of the battle, and there too was the Dark Lord-
"-what you never got, Lord Voldemort, was that FRIENDSHIP. IS. MAGIC!"
And a column erupted from his wand, black as night and twisted, folded like a Dementor's cloak, like a silken veil, leaving an inky gas in the air as it flew and spiraled up. It twisted forward and it was coming down, to crash on the Dark Lord, to obliterate and decimate and kill-
"Avadakedavra!"