Hurrah! Another update. Reminder: I don't own the quotes that are also in the book, of course. Now, here's the BIG chapter … yeah, THAT one … the BIG one … go on, read it already!

The curse missed me by an inch. I felt it brush past me and shuddered. Suddenly, I was shoved aside. Almost falling over with the force of the shove and struggling to regain my balance, I saw that it was my mother who had barged in.

"NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! OUT OF MY WAY!" she shouted, shoving us all aside.

She started with some fancy wandwork that was hard to follow. I was pleased to see that Bellatrix didn't have her normal cool, collected, haughty grin on. It faltered, and suddenly she was snarling at my mother.

It was like a twisted kind of laser light show; lights of all different colors were flying through the air between my mother and Bellatrix, and I leapt back as the ground inches from me started cracking and getting hot.

A few people from my year and Harry's tried to help my mom, but she wouldn't let them.

"No!" she cried at her would-be helpers. "Get back! Get back! She's mine!"

Talk about possessive of your children.

I now noticed that everyone had pushed off to the sides of the hall. The only ones still fighting were Bellatrix, my mother, Voldemort, and his opponents, who were McGonagall, Slughorn, and Kingsley. This was tension like I have never felt before.

Now Bellatrix began going for emotional attacks.

"What will happen to your children when I've killed you?" she taunted, somehow making the dodging, swerving, and advanced wandwork seem like some brutal dance. "When Mummy's gone the same way as Freddie?"

I glared at her, fury building inside me. She had stooped low.

"You- will – never – touch – our – children - again!" my mother shrieked furiously, her face screwing up in anger. And that's when it happened. She made the same mistake as Sirius.

She laughed.

Must run in the family. But- back to the story. My mother shot a Killing Curse. It seemed to go in slow motion (to "Eye of the Tiger," of course) under Bellatrix's arm, which was extended towards my mother, with wand in hand, and hit her chest, directly above her heart.

Bellatrix's eyes bulged, and she fell backwards onto the hard marble floor.

The crowd was roaring and cheering and whistling and just generally making noise, while Voldemort screamed in shock and fury. With an impatient wave of his wand behind his back at the three wizards he was dueling, he turned towards my mother. The threesome flew through the air and slammed into the wall at the back of the hall, sinking to the bottom. It would have been extremely comical in any other situation, really.

"Protego!" came a painfully familiar voice from nowhere; for a split second the crowd became quite noisy as they speculated on where it had come from, but their questions were soon answered.

There was a collective gasp and Harry suddenly came gradually into view as he pulled off what I assumed was his Invisibility Cloak.

I had never heard anything so loud. Everyone screamed, yelled, and whooped with joy and reinstated hope. But suddenly, they realized what this meant, and the atmosphere changed instantly; this meant a huge confrontation that wasn't going to end until one of them died.

One way or another, the world was about to change.

They were circling each other. It was like something out a movie, but it wasn't funny, and it wasn't lighthearted …

I was halfway through the crowd and into the middle of the Great Hall before Harry said loudly, "I don't want anyone else to try to help. It's got to be like this. It's got to be me."

I knew he had his reasons, so I stayed back in the crowd like an obedient little girlfriend. I heard Voldemort hiss and shuddered again.

"Potter doesn't mean that," said Voldemort. His bright red eyes were wide. "That isn't how he works, is it? Who are you going to use as a shield today, Potter?"

"Nobody," said Harry bluntly. "There are no more Horcruxes."

"What did he just call him?!" I hissed to Luna, who I once again found myself standing next to. (Stalker.)

"It's just you and me," Harry was saying. "Neither can live while the other survives, and one of us is about to leave for good …."

"One of us?" Voldemort said with a sneer worthy of Snape. Education goes both ways, I suppose. "You think it will be you, do you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?"

He looked like he was ready to strike, but Harry stayed calm and collected as Voldemort continued to taunt him in front of the entire school and their families, as if he were simply having a slight disagreement with Malfoy. In fact, he answered evenly, keeping his head held high and not looking ashamed at all.

"Accident, was it, when my mother died to save me? Accident, when I decided to fight in the graveyard? Accident, that I didn't defend myself tonight, and still survived, and returned to fight again?"

I didn't completely understand what Harry was saying about defending himself (like an inside joke between Voldemort and him, you know) but I got the gist of it.

Voldemort was screaming at Harry now, but he wasn't phased, and if he was, he didn't show it. Finally, all those years at the Dursleys' had paid off.

"You won't be killing anyone else tonight," Harry was telling Voldemort, and I praed he meant other than who had already died, not other than himself. Why did he have to be so noble?!

Harry continued, "You won't be able to kill any of them ever again. Don't you get it? I was ready to die to stop you from hurting these people-"

I glared.

"But you did not!" Voldemort interrupted.

"-I meant to, and that's what did it," Harry was answering. "I've done what my mother did. They're protected from you. Haven't you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can't torture them. You can't touch them. You don't learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?"

Voldemort complained about Harry using his full name, and Harry went on telling him how stupid he was, and would he like to be told a few things before he made any more mistakes.

"Is it love again?" Voldemort asked sneeringly. "Dumbledore's favorite solution, love, which he claimed conquered death, though love did not stop him falling from the tower and breaking like an old waxwork? Love, which did not prevent me stamping out your Mudblood mother like a cockroach, Potter – and nobody seems to love you enough to run forward this time and take my curse."

"Au contraire," I muttered, trying to fight my way through the crowd. But my mother, a few feet in front of me, stopped me and pushed me back.

"You don't understand what's going on here. None of us do. So you can't interfere," she hissed as she turned back around to watch the fight.

"I understand he's going to die!" I pouted grumpily.

I had no choice but to sit back and watch the scene; Voldemort was laughing a spine-chilling, horrible, cold, humorless sort of laugh at something Harry had said.

Voldemort scoffed at Harry about how he knew more magic than even Dumbledore, which Harry was quick to correct him on, telling him Dumbledore had been too great a man to use the magic Voldemort had.

"I brought about the death of Albus Dumbledore!" protested Voldemort.

"You thought you did," said Harry, "but you were wrong."

This was news to me (and, by the sound of it, everyone else, too) as much as it was to Voldemort. I shushed the people around me to hear what would be said next.

"Dumbledore is dead!" shrieked Voldemort.

"Yes, Dumbledore's dead," agreed Harry placidly, "but you didn't have him killed. He chose his own manner of dying, chose it months before he died, arranged the whole thing with the man you thought was your servant."

Voldemort tried to tell him he was wrong, but Harry announced to the crowd's surprise, "Severus Snape wasn't yours. Snape was Dumbledore's, Dumbledore's from the moment you started hunting down my mother. And you never realized it, because of the thing you can't understand. You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?"

There was silence. Both in poses resembling hunting stances, they continued to circle each other.

"Snape's Patronus was a doe," said Harry, "the same as my mother's, because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from the time when they were children."

Voldemort's slit-like nostrils flared, and Harry told him, "You should have realized, he asked you to spare her life, didn't he?"

Voldemort protested and started going on about how Snape had moved on and all that, but Harry pointed out that of course he wasn't about to tell him that it had made him so angry he had switched allegiances. Voldemort, defeated, went to a weak argument along the lines of "it doesn't matter, they're both dead, and so's Dumbledore."

They bantered for a while longer, agreeing that Dumbledore's plan had gone wrong, and then Harry said, "Try for some remorse, Riddle …."

Voldemort looked utterly offended.

"What is this?"

"It's your one last chance," replied Harry mercifully, "it's all you've got left…. I've seen what you'll be otherwise …. Be a man … try … try for some remorse …."

More back-and-forth, then Harry announced, "Dumbledore's last plan hasn't backfired on me at all. It's backfired on you, Riddle."

After such a long chat, it was now obvious that the moment was near. Make or break.

They started going on about who really owned the wand in Voldemort's hand. Harry decided that he was, which I gathered meant it wouldn't work on him- if he was right, there was nothing to be afraid of. He'd be fine. But was he right?

A voice rang out. "Avada Kedavra!"

Another one came, more familiar, "Expelliarmus!"

There was a sound like several gunshots at once, and the spells collided in gold flames right in between the two of them.

Then, Voldemort's wand flew out of his hand and spun through the air to Harry.

And for the second and final time, a Killing Curse backfired on Voldemort.

The battle had come full circle.