Disclaimer: I do not own nor profit off of Harry Potter and associated property/merchandise.
Something had gone wrong.
"Didn't I kill you?" Voldemort asked, waving his wand accusingly in Harry's direction as he hopped out of Hagrid's arms to the ground.
"Avada Kedavra," Harry replied, and Voldemort staggered a little as the green light washed over him, but was otherwise unharmed.
"Oh." He paused to take in this information, Harry tapping a foot impatiently off to the side. "Reducto," he tried, and Harry exploded, but very quickly reassembled.
"Ow," Harry complained pointedly, throwing a bone breaker hex at Voldemort's skull in retaliation, which was similarly undone.
They eyed each other in silence, the armies surrounding the two unnerved by the display before them.
"Well, something has to work," Voldemort said frankly and Harry shrugged just as the fiendfyre engulfed him. He managed to convey the fire to Voldemort before burning entirely through the little used headbutt-tackle, and the armies stared at their ashes disbelievingly until they swirled back into their fearless leaders. "Something has to work," the Dark Lord repeated, and threw another spell.
For hours, curses flew and hexes landed as the sun crept below the horizon and the Death Eaters began transfiguring tents and small shacks. The Hogwarts crowd simply wandered back into the castle.
The next few days, the Hogwarts students and staff willing to fight would exit the castle at dawn, and meander down to the battlefield with more food than they needed, and the two armies would eat breakfast together as Voldemort drowned Harry on land or Harry skewered Voldemort with various pointy objects and spells. As the mornings wore on, each side staged their own mock battles and spars to keep up their edge, and ate lunch apart. During the afternoons, bets were taken and people cheered on their favorites. Favorite deaths, that is.
"Inside out, milord!" Bellatrix shouted from the sidelines, "Turn him inside out again!"
"Drop him in a volcano!" A grey-robed wizard called to one or the other of them, "What was made in its magma-"
"Hit him with a stick, Harry!" Ron enthused, and at Hermione's incredulous look, defended, "It worked for the troll."
The tradition of this cacophony of cheering and calls had started as honest encouragement for the two, but degenerated into more of a gladiatorial sport as the days wore on. Needless to say, during this time, Harry and Voldemort had a standing pact to deafen each other after each regeneration before trying any other method of death-dealing.
As the evenings came about, the ruckus would settle down, and whichever of the opponents could hear would finite the other's deafness.
After a particularly gruesome tie one evening, a newly revived Harry remarked to a similarly shiny new Voldemort, "Do you think maybe someone else needs to do something?"
Voldemort held back the Plague Curse on the tip of his tongue, wand still pointing at Harry, "The power I know not?"
"No, I mean, maybe it's…" Realizing Voldemort did not, in fact, know the rest of the prophecy, Harry faltered. Still… It wasn't as if it would change anything now. "That bit of the prophecy you didn't know, it said," Harry adopted a misty, Trelawney-like tone and waggled his fingers mystically, "and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives..." Returning to a normal tone of voice, he continued, "But maybe our 'hand' is actually someone acting under our direction?" Voldemort was staring at him in shock, and Harry hit him with an over-powered Bat Bogey Hex that exploded from his lack of nose so forcefully bits of Voldemort face splattered across Harry's robes. Still, the Dark Lord wasn't even cross when he regenerated, still staring in shock. "I know it's odd that I'd just tell you the prophecy, but I think after a week of non-stop deaths together, we've grown close enough for that," Harry said wryly.
"No, you idiotic child; that's not the issue," Voldemort told Harry's smoldering remains. Alright, he was a little cross. Still, he repeated himself for Harry's convenience once he'd returned, and continued, "That can't be the real prophecy."
"It is," Harry lowered himself to the ground, sitting with his knees to his chest and one arm wrapped around his legs. The other was pointing a wand Voldemort's direction, as had become habit. "Rifle through my not-a-book-to-be-read."
"What."
"My thoughts, my mind," Harry corrected himself, intentionally not clearing his mind as he met Voldemort's eyes.
Within a second, Voldemort found the appropriate memory and returned. "What," he repeated blankly.
"Yeah, so maybe someone else as our hand-"
"Harry Potter."
It was Harry's turn to say it, "What?"
Voldemort stalked the few steps left between them and crouched dramatically in front of the boy. "Neither shall live while the other survives."
"That wasn't scary and ominous," Harry commented, noticing randomly that the only reason Voldemort could get this close to his face was due to his lack of nose.
"Are you alive, Harry?" Voldemort asked dangerously, with not a little impatience.
"…Yeees."
"And would you say, perhaps, that I, too, am alive at this moment in time?" Pitch rising to ear-piercing levels by the end of Voldemort's question, the Dark Lord rose to his feet and shrieked, "Are all of you idiots?"
Trying to figure it out, Harry murmured, "Neither shall live while the other… Oh."
"The prophecy is broken," Voldemort moaned, his anger abruptly abandoning him as he sank to the ground beside Harry, feet akimbo in front of him before he flopped entirely onto his back, "14 years as a shade for a child who can't even kill me."
Before he could stop himself, Harry had asked, "Was it very unpleasant?"
"Excruciatingly."
Thinking on this, Harry replied, "Good." At Voldemort's Avada Kedavra, he elaborated, "You did kill my parents just before that instead of, say, knocking them out or immobilizing them or putting them into a deep sleep or…" Harry began to count on his fingers the many ways a man of Voldemort's power could have taken Lily and James out of the way non-lethally and the Dark Lord curled away from him, drawing his robes over his head in an attempt to ignore the boy. Dwelling on the futility of the past decade and then some, Voldemort didn't notice himself accidentally falling asleep for the first time in a week. Not soon after, Harry trailed off mid-word and slumped over Voldemort's side, the uncomfortable position not bothering him in the slightest.
The unnoticed third party took note of the armies' slow returns to their increasingly complex tents and Hogwarts and decided to finally clamber down from the trees of the Forbidden Forest and make their way silently over to the dozing pair. Unspeakables filtered out of the shadows and surrounded the battlefield.
"Did it work?" A grey-cloaked figure asked, and his companion prodded the less dangerous of the two with her wand.
"Yes," she confirmed, lifting the tip of her wand from Voldemort's cheek and wiping it on her robes, "Finally. First we have to follow them around trying to get them in the same place for three years, and then they take a week to fall asleep!"
"They never stopped killing each other long enough for the enchantment to take hold, before," Another coworker droned and the first figure snorted.
"Thank you for that necessary explanation."
A shake of the head was all the response he would get to that bit of sarcasm.
"Shall we begin?" Their mission leader reminded them, and the others got into position. A bit of group conjuring and transfiguring later, a roundish box of gleaming, bone-white metal grew around the slumbering foes, and the Unspeakables dragged it off into the night. When they were a safe distance away from Hogwarts' recovering wards, a portkey took them to the deepest level of the Department of Mysteries, a place rarely seen and never easily entered. This floor was dark, and any light brought into it strangely dimmed: one could never see the edges of the room for the shadow that cloaked it. Tables of various shapes and sizes were arranged concisely in a grid pattern, disappearing into the darkness in a way that seemed as if the pattern went on forever. On each table, little dips in the material held strange, white eggs that sat in expectant silence.
Not a few of the Unspeakables shuddered, despite seeing the room before.
"Never stops the spooky," a male voice complained, shrinking the bone-white box and placing it in the only open spot on any table within seeing distance, "How is there only ever one spot open, and only if we've brought down a new one?"
"Magic," a female intoned dramatically before elbowing him in the ribs playfully, "How can you say it's creepy? Haven't you ever gotten to see one hatch?"
"That's even creepier," he replied, and a younger voice spoke up.
"Hatch?" The rookie asked, "How can they hatch?"
Before the female could repeat her explanation of 'magic,' the elder male raised his voice to drown her out, "These are the semi-immortal remnants of broken prophecies, right?"
Sensing his elder was waiting for a response, the rookie said, "Yes."
"Well, what semi-immortal magical creature can you think of that doesn't mate?" The female teased, and eyes went wide under the rookie's hood.
"But we put a Dark Lord in there!" He pointed at the little box that was currently in the process of smoothing its edges into a more egg-like shape.
"It'll be a set of twins, and you know they don't part from each other," was the more responsible Unspeakable's explanation, "The goodness of one will infect the other."
"Honestly, Magic has to do something with prophecy remnants if they can't be destroyed," the female continued a tad exasperatedly when the rookie was just standing in silence, "Where else would phoenixes come from?"
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