Author's Note: There were two main points I took away from the feedback specifically on the end of chapter 10. Two actionable notes isolated to that specific part of the story, anyway. One, that Moody's death doesn't work in the moment. And two, that Sirius' possession strains credulity in the moment. Both are issues of internal consistency, upon reflection. Both are also pretty easy to address, in theory. The only real question was whether I wanted to go for minimal changes, or thorough changes. Both paths had their plusses and minuses. I opted for minimal changes, mostly because I did already quite like this fight scene. Thus, this potential revision to the canon chapter 10.

It was gloomy and dark where they landed, a large enclosed space made of well-polished stone. Sirius held his wand in front of him and pivoted, putting his back to their group as he looked around. He saw vaulted ceilings, gray stone, elaborate torches on the walls, a cauldron over simmering coals, and a floor of writhing black shadows from wall to wall–

"Incendio!" he yelled, flinging a blast of fire at the hundreds of black snakes coming for them. Dozens died, and dozens more avoided the fire, and his next two frantic casts. Then they were on him, and the rest of the group.

Fangs bit into his legs, his robes, his shoes. He kicked and cast a flame-freezing charm on himself, then doused his front with fire, scorching them off. Insects buzzed around him and the others – he had his back to someone, probably Taylor – and stung snakes, and his flames helped, Moody was yelling something, there were so many of them! He didn't know a spell better suited to mass snake-killing than incendio, but it wasn't enough–

He heard an especially loud, strident hiss from behind him. The snakes veered off, a bloodied and burnt tide of scale and fang breaking around their defensive circle like the tide.

Something else hissed, from elsewhere in the room, and the fight kicked back into gear. Sirius made good use of the momentary respite, conjuring a bucket of oil and tossing it into the writhing mass as it surged forward, then burning that along with the snakes themselves.

The scent of burnt meat invaded his nostrils, but they kept coming until the closer hiss sounded again. Then another hiss, and it started again. The hisses came faster, back and forth, and Sirius turned to see Harry was one of the two hissing. Taylor was missing, and Moody had a massive dead snake sticking off his shoulder like a shred of mostly-destroyed cape.

Sirius took a step back and ripped the snake off of Moody, seizing it by the jaw and prying its lengthy fangs out of his shoulder. "Where's Taylor?" he demanded, in between the stop and start attacks from the horde of legless monsters.

"Buggered if I – don't throw it away, need the fangs!" Moody gasped, snatching the dead snake from Sirius' grasp. "Venom, need antivenom."

Harry's hissing was providing them a partial respite, and Sirius fully intended to use it to find Taylor. He looked around in between Incendios, gaining an idea of what else was around the room. There were runes carved into the walls, runes of protection and deflection, and the door was sealed with blobs of iron instead of locks. He knew that setup, there would be no getting out by the door. They had portkeyed into a partially-sealed ritual room. Harry might still be able to go, Moody's logic held up, but that would be the only way out. The room was bare save for snake carcasses, still-living snakes, the boiling cauldron, and a freckled pale body tied up in the corner. Percy Weasley.

Taylor shifted into view, grimacing as she changed back from a snake right at the cauldron. She reached in, jabbing her wand downward. "Call them off!" she yelled at the contents of the cauldron.

The hiss Harry was countering, which Sirius now realized was coming from the cauldron, cut off. Harry hissed once more, and the snakes retreated, still numbering in the hundreds despite the mass slaughter.

"Bugger me," Moody grunted. "That was close. Boy, get out of here!"

"Can't, he'll hiss again and none of you speak Parseltongue to tell them off," Harry argued.

"He?" Sirius looked to Taylor, who was staring into the cauldron.

"This… thing," she said. "What is it?"

"I am Lord Voldemort!" a shrill voice shrieked from the cauldron.

Sirius shared an incredulous look with Moody. Moody took point as the three of them approached the cauldron, stepping around and over dozens of momentarily docile snakes.

What lay inside, partially submerged in a soup of unidentifiable sludge, was an unnatural baby-like creature, something straight from the how-to section of a beginner book on necromancy. A baby-thing that was no baby, though if he knew his dark magic it might have started out as one. It was a human homunculus, and a sickly one inundated with even more dark magic than needed for its creation.

One with Voldemort's red eyes and high voice.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" Taylor asked. Her wand poked the thing in the forehead. She sounded utterly unimpressed, though that might have been because she had no personal experience with the thing in the cauldron or the one it claimed to be.

"I can never die," the homunculus declared. "I will return, and you will aid me or you will suffer for opposing me. Already, it is too late to stop me!"

"You're the one who attacked the Potters and tried to kill their son?" Taylor asked.

"Yes!" the homunculus said. "I will take his–"

"Reducto."

Sirius shielded his face, but he still got potion and homunculus blend all over himself as it exploded out of the cauldron.

"Stay dead this time," Taylor told the chunky slurry.


The glee Taylor's power felt was completely out of line with the disgusting blend of potion and evil baby-body dark lord, but Taylor understood why. Thanks to Sirius and his veritaserum interrogation, she knew her power wanted her to live forever, and here was a dark lord claiming he was unkillable thanks to magic. It was a lead, though she was going to put her foot down if immortality had to be anything like the existence she had just ended.

The four of them stood around the cauldron, in various states of soaked and covered in chunky bits of rotten flesh, shocked by her sudden, explosive decision.

She didn't regret it. She didn't kill often – Winky the house elf was her only confirmed kill in this world – but Voldemort was the obvious exception, akin to this world's Hitler except this world had a real Hitler and another dark lord who was more obviously his magical equivalent. He had tried to kill Harry once, had arranged to kidnap him today, and was a terrorist responsible for hundreds of deaths. Blowing him to pieces before he could do anything was the right move.

"That's going to make the paperwork a bitch," Moody remarked.

Sirius wiped potion from his face. His hands shook, and then he fell.

"Sirius!" Harry cried out, crouching beside him. Moody went to his other side and put a wand to his chest, muttering the beginning of a diagnostic charm. Taylor looked to Harry and then herself, but she felt fine and Harry wasn't showing any signs of fainting like Sirius.

"I don't know what this potion is, but it isn't hurting him," Moody reported. "Physically," he added grimly. "This was a ritual, started but not complete. No other possible reagents in the room except the real Weasley, and Potter." He bent over to perform another muttered charm on Sirius' midsection. "Poison from a backfired healing ritual, maybe," he added in an undertone. "If that was what it was. Healing, rebirth, maybe possession–"

Sirius' eyes shot open at that word, even as Moody whipped his wand up, and they were red. "Reducto!" Sirius shouted.

Moody's flew halfway across the ritual room, defended from fatal harm by his charmed robes and a last-second shield charm, but Sirius was upon him in an instant, blocking her first three spells with his free hand and countering Moody's retaliation with his wand, engaging in a lightning-fast flurry of spells that ended with a shouted "Avada Kedavra" that struck bare stone floor as Moody rolled out of the way and came up firing.

This wasn't Sirius.

Taylor set her wasps – the precious few she had left after fighting the snakes amidst all the fire – on him, but he jolted away, his limbs moving unnaturally, and threw three wandless, wordless bolts of spellfire at her, forcing her to dive behind the cauldron. Her wasps struck at his eyes as Harry scrambled away, and Moody cast another sizzling set of curses, but Voldemort muttered something and a familiar shimmering shield burst out of his robes, denying her bugs purchase on his body and leaving him free to deal with Moody's spells.

"I cannot die!" Voldemort yelled as he blasted the cauldron over on top of her. She threw herself out of the way and behind a chunky pile of snake bodies, then kept moving because a single blasting curse would turn her cover into soupy mush. "I will not die!" he yelled as she moved. "I will have his body, and I will kill you all!"

Too late, she put the pieces together. An unknown ritual. Percy Weasley kept alive and in the sealed ritual room for no apparent purpose beyond providing Barty with his Polyjuice ingredients, which he could have done from anywhere. Sirius accidentally ingesting the potion. Voldemort possessing Sirius, too easily, too quickly, with so much raw power. It was never intended to be Sirius, it was intended to be Harry, or Percy if Barty failed, but things had gone wrong.

She ducked a curse from Sirius' wand, a frightfully energetic beam of blue light that scored the runes off the wall far behind her, further damaging the ritual room. Voldemort hissed, and the living snakes all reared up, but Harry hissed right back at him and they turned on each other, killing their brethren.

"Ah," Voldemort said, allowing the snakes to continue killing each other, though he could have hissed to stop it. His red eyes focused on Harry, even as he cast several different shields to block the erratic spellfire coming from Moody. "Potter. I wondered if there was anything to it. Let us see if you are my equal, after all."

Harry shouted something, waving his wand in a complex motion, but a crackling bolt of red lightning drove him behind the toppled cauldron before he could finish casting. Sirius – but it was really Voldemort – was on him in a second, moving unnaturally quickly, pulling him out by the robes.

Harry grabbed at Sirius' arm, clawing ineffectually at his white magic shield. Taylor hit Sirius in the back with a stunner. It deflected off the white shield, but the physical impact rocked him and Harry got his wand up to accio a chunk of burnt snake into the back of his head.

The snake skull bounced off another skin-level shield of white light, and Voldemort threw Harry into a pile of still-smoldering snake corpses.

Taylor ran out from behind her meager snake-pile cover, her wand waving as she cast four explosive hexes in a row, relying more on their physical impact than any hope of them actually breaking through to harm him. Voldemort piloted Sirius' body with a fast but jerky stiffness, returning with two spells, both sizzling with dark energy that she knew she could not shield, only dodge.

"No witch can outmatch me," he yelled, even as she continued to dodge and run. Fighting close-up, her go-to strategy for dealing with wizards, was worthless if his shield deflected her fists as well as they did her bugs, her spells, and Harry's hands. Magic might break through, powerful magic, but she had the repertoire of a first-year with a learning disability and a knack for charms over their year level, not anything sufficiently dark and powerful. She needed Moody to break it, because she didn't know that kind of magic.

Voldemort, even in another person's body, had no such problem. He sent a steady stream of sizzling, unrecognizable curses at her, half of them exploding on impact with the ground or the walls and the other half even more ominously blinking away to no apparent effect, so esoteric they must have targeted living things specifically. She exploited her insect-facilitated spatial awareness for all it was worth, dodging before his hands had even finished waving his wand, but the wandless spells he mixed in had no such tell and she avoided those by the skin of her teeth, each one easily capable of tripping her up and killing her in some no doubt gruesome way.

Harry sprinted towards the sealed door while Voldemort was distracted by her. She hoped he was trying to escape, but she knew he wasn't. The only exit he had was his portkey, which he could use at any time, but wasn't. Damn his bravery, she wanted him out of here!

Two individuals rejoined the fight, one casting much less powerful curses than the other; Moody had succeeded in reviving Percy Weasley and given him a spare wand in the bare moments Voldemort was occupied with her, apparently trusting her to hold her own. She dodged a pitch-black spell that howled like the wind, sent a stream of water at Voldemort to block his view, and went on the offensive, casting explosive hexes as fast as she could wave her wand, then faster still as she gave up saying the incantation or moving her wand. Her head throbbed in time with the ever-increasing pace of magic.

Voldemort batted her hexes away like the inconsequential pests they were, only momentarily stymied. Percy Weasley raised his borrowed wand behind the dark lord's back, winding up a spell with an extremely long and complicated incantation. Moody transfigured the ground around him, raising up stone spears to fling at Voldemort. Harry abandoned his attempts to get the door open and began casting again, the same overly long incantation he had tried to cast to begin with. Taylor set her bugs in Voldemort's eyes and ears, still hindering his senses even if they couldn't reach his flesh to bite and burrow. She switched to cutting hexes and then environmental hexes to oil the ground and heat the air and do other things that might get around his shield, steadily advancing, dodging spells by mere inches with the forewarning and spatial awareness her power granted, pushing, unyielding. She and Moody provided the moment-by-moment threats, while Harry and Percy prepared their single, otherwise unwieldy magics.

For a moment, it looked like they might actually be matching him, all together. That he was going to be overwhelmed when Harry and Percy struck, when Moody speared him with rock, when her spells broke through his flickering white shields.

Voldemort snarled, whipped his wand down, and vanished in a crack of displaced air. Harry's spell and Percy Weasley's spell soared through the empty air, colliding with three of Moody's stone spears.

The wards didn't block portkeys or apparition.

Voldemort snapped back into existence behind her.

She turned. Too slow. Too late.

Red-hot pain erupted as a spell connected with her good shoulder, driving her to the ground. She lifted her arm to wield her wand, but there was no arm, no wand. It was on the ground beside her, and her stump – her new stump, even higher up than the other – was gushing blood.

That didn't stop her. The wand had only ever been a crutch. A painkiller.

She knelt, listening to Voldemort's eerily familiar laughter driven through Sirius' body, and drove her knees, lurching towards him and willing herself to shift at the same time, not into the black adder, into something much bigger, much more dangerous.

A boa constrictor struck at Voldemort, writhing around a reflexive blasting curse to wind around his midsection, pinning his arms down. Taylor pummeled his body with wordless, wandless stunners, her headache driving to a fever pitch, rising more rapidly than ever before. The white light shields burned her scales, more as she constricted, Voldemort struggled against her pinning grip and he hissed demands that she cease, yield, but the shields were faltering, shattering with bursts of light, and she found flesh beneath to crush. He was stuck wandlessly defending against Moody's renewed assault while he struggled to free his arms. Any one of Moody's incoming spells if not blocked would pulverize, burn, or otherwise raze his body beyond repair.

Sirius' flesh. His body, regardless of who was commandeering it right now.

She continued attempting to wandlessly stun him even as she struggled to constrict, her crippling headache well past migraine territory and verging on physically disabling. She didn't want to kill him, not when he was Sirius, but if she had to–

The choice was taken from her when Voldemort maneuvered his wand to her midsection and hit her with something. Something more painful than anything she had ever felt, so painful she let go instead of constricting like shocks were supposed to do, so painful she didn't even feel it when he kicked her away from himself. The pain was all-consuming.

It let up, leaving her snake body twitching raggedly.

He cast a charm on her in between two sickening brown spells that forced Moody to transfigure a stone barrier to defend himself, one she thought might be meant to force animagi back to their human form. It didn't work, but she shifted back anyway, the few shreds of rational thought left to her insisting that if she was to surprise him again, he mustn't know she wasn't actually an animagus at all.

She regretted it when he hit her with the same immensely painful curse a second time, adding to the agony of having just lost another arm. She convulsed, choking out screams and just plain choking, writhing in the dirt. It lasted forever, an eternity of agony. She hadn't felt such pain… ever. Definitely not since Bakuda's bomb damaged her nerves. Nothing came close.

It ended, leaving her limp on the ground, armless and unarmed, physically incapable of even sitting up. Her eye, the one with the floaters, wasn't working. Darkness covered one half of her vision, a welcome partial respite from reality.

Voldemort turned on the others, a fast-moving monster in her dimmed vision. His magical shields were cracked and broken, but she had a bare handful of bugs scattered throughout the room. Outside, on the edges of her range, more insects swarmed in through the massive building housing the ritual room, but the walls were impervious, and they couldn't get in.

"Get out of here, kid!" Moody yelled, trading spell for spell with Voldemort.

"Accio Portkeys!" Voldemort incanted, simultaneously raising a red, ominous field of magic around himself with his free hand. Harry spun around as his portkey was dragged from his pocket, while Moody leaped forward, leaning into the pull to close the distance. He slashed his wand down, parting the red haze with a burst of blue light that became the first in a lightning-fast series of attacks right in Voldemort's face.

Taylor tried to roll over, to get her feet under her, but her body spasmed helplessly. She was too weak. Too slow.

Moody and Voldemort traded blows, but only for a few seconds. After one bright flash, Moody fell with a guttural scream, the left side of his torso rotting away. A pale green killing curse struck him an instant afterward, flashing morbidly in the otherwise dark room.

Moody was dead. Harry was on the ground, breathing heavily. Percy Weasley was petrified, standing up. Blood seeped out of Taylor's wound, black and sluggish. She could feel the contamination at the stump, a creeping dark itch that mingled with the muted agony. Her head was spinning, and there was no strength in her body.

Unseen hands forced her up, tilted her chin back and pulled her eyelids open to meet the gaze of a Sirius with red eyes and an evil smirk. Behind him, Harry and Percy Weasley struggled with their own invisible bonds, levitated over to lay against the knocked-over cauldron. Her arm lay on the ground behind her, morbidly intact up to just below the shoulder. Her bugs, the few she had left, littered the battlefield, worthless at the moment against an enemy who had made himself impervious to them once more, his shields renewed. Harry's wand, along with Moody's wand and the wand given to Percy, lay on the ground behind Voldemort, all snapped. Voldemort had the only wand in the room besides her own, which he must have known from Barty was useless to everyone but her, and now her as well as she had no hands to use it with.

Her power was eerily silent, not a hint of conveyed emotion to tell her what it was thinking. This, she supposed, might be the sort of situation it lived for. One that demanded creative problem-solving.

If so, her power was going to be severely disappointed, because she had nothing and no plans, not even an inkling of one. The pain of that curse – it had to be Crucio – made planning and strategizing impossible, even once it was lifted. She was dying, besides. There was no plan in that.

"You accomplished nothing," Voldemort told her, evil words spilling from Sirius' lips. "The ritual can be redone before this body gives out. I still have the boy and the spare. They will still both serve their intended purposes and be dead by dusk. You did not even make for a challenging fight. Who are you, pitiful excuse for a witch? What did you think to gain from opposing me?"

Not Skitter, that was for sure. She wouldn't lose. Not like this. Someone else.

"I'll take it from your mind," Voldemort hissed. He stared into her eyes, though she could only see him from one.

She remembered, almost involuntarily, introducing herself as Taylor, as Taylor Hebert, as Weaver, as Skitter, as Taylor, all from different times in her life. Voldemort's smug expression morphed to one of consternation, and then curiosity.

Other memories flicked to the forefront of her mind, drawn up like following threads, linked by common ideas. Weaver, her life in Boston, fighting, training, arguing, facing other enemies, powerful ones, inconsequential ones. He seized on the Slaughterhouse Nine, following the threads to her first fight with Mannequin as Skitter, a similarly hopeless-feeling struggle with a marginally better outcome.

He made her think of using her insects to carry supplies to herself to fight Mannequin, and in the back of her mind, under the current memory, an idea germinated. Her insects gathered by her discarded arm, working her wand out from its grip.

"What is all this?" he whispered, delving deeper into her life. Memories, moments, from all over, from different times, different fights, all presumably presented alongside thousands of impossible perspectives, as Dumbledore had seen. They flicked past, showing him horror after horror, scenes of slaughter, desperate struggles, Leviathan–

He recoiled, but then smiled, a deeply disturbing smile, and kept digging. His mental push was a hot poker in her mind, dragging things up from the depths without any care for their surroundings.

Without any care for their physical surroundings here in the ritual room, either. Her insects brought her wand to Harry. But that wasn't enough. He was petrified.

Her magic had never been hers, not really. It was lent, lent like her control of bugs. She provided the meaning to the possibility.

Voldemort found her memories of the Simurgh, of her power, and stopped there, lingering on the scream, the devastation, the untouched danger. On Taylor's knowledge that the Simurgh still existed, somewhere. Planning. Plotting. Always weaving.

She didn't know what he thought of that. Was the Simurgh a terror, even for him? It should be. Or was he foolish enough to see it as a weapon to be harnessed? Possibly as a force of nature to be avoided and weathered if it ever found him?

He looked upon monstrosities more dangerous than he could ever be, more terrifying. It was inevitable he followed that link to Scion.

Wasps and flies and cockroaches manipulated her wand with flawless coordination, waving it in a specific pattern. One last spell, one she had never practiced wordlessly, but driven by more need than ever before.

One failure. Pain.

Two failures. Pain, more this time.

Three failures. Her awareness trembled, wavering back and forth.

She tried a fourth time, and the moment she completed the wand movement her headache spiked, driving the last of her will from her with pure pain. She knew only the memories Voldemort wanted to peruse. The agony, the horror of Scion, the countless deaths. Fighting back. The pure power of hundreds of parahumans, coordinated perfectly. Coordinated by her and the thing that had taken control of her as she was broken, pushing in and influencing her. Her power.

A third presence made itself known in her mind even as he realized that there was a threat. Her power, finally showing itself, the monster that jealously guarded her mind. Voldemort was so deep. So exposed. Her power had learned from its mistake with Dumbledore.

The shards behind powers did not act directly.

Shards were not supposed to act directly.

But magic broke a lot of rules.

What was to come next…

It was out of her hands, and that scared her.

She had never dealt well with having no control over her fate.

"Possessionem Skurge!"

Voldemort and her power were driven from her mind with equal ferocity, the blowback of a magical detonation washing over her and driving everything but her own addled thoughts away in a wash of imposed willpower, a blast of purpose from a spell so powerful it worked on her mind even though it had not been cast at her.

Her power bounced back, only momentarily pushed away. Voldemort did not.

She saw, through one blurry eye and a hundred insect eyes, Sirius' body folding over in the midst of an explosive spell detonation, physically untouched but deprived of volition. Something unholy shrieked.

Harry slumped down, his hand burnt and bloody from the exploded splinters that remained of her wand. Blood streamed down his forehead, seeping from his scar and from the splinters that had cut his face.

Author's Note: So, changes:

Moody lives longer, though his participation doesn't actually change the flow of the battle any. If Moody on his own was a match for Voldemort it might have, but if that were true a lot of canon would be different too. He died on his feet this time, though, and only fell after losing the extremely useful support and distraction Taylor offered. I think his participation actually helps the time between Sirius' possession and Taylor's disarming (ha) feel more believable, at that, so that's nice. Throughout the fight you'll see mentions of Moody keeping up the pressure on Voldy, and I gave him the opportunity to free and arm Percy, which neatly avoids the whole 'whose wand would Percy use if Moody isn't dead, though?' problem. Voldemort is conveniently too powerful for Moody to do much more.

Voldemort is slightly less tight-lipped, referencing taking something from Harry right before Taylor blows him up. This could be interpreted by readers to be his blood as per the canon ritual, but in retrospect that's not the only thing it could be, by any means. His body would fit just as well as the intended end of the sentence.

Moody mentions 'no other possible reagents for the ritual', which is meant to draw attention to how there aren't any 'bones of the father' sitting around waiting to be added, and how we're not in a convenient graveyard. The ritual room is sealed, which was the case in the previous version of the fight too, further implying that aside from Harry and Barty, all of the necessary components are in the room. (There is apparition, but if you're planning to apparate back and forth to shuttle in ingredients, why not just… not lock the convenient door until you have everything ready?)

Moody figures it out. This, again, doesn't change anything, but if it wasn't such a fast possession he would have caught on in time to stop it, which makes him look more competent in the face of these new hints, not less. Not so competent that he recognizes the ritual on sight or anything, but that too would be unbelievable given it came from the Malfoy family library and isn't known to the Aurors as a result.

Taylor figures it out approximately three seconds after Moody. Here, I spelled it out, because with the new hints it would be weird for her to not get it, and her knowing changes next to nothing. Possessionem Skurge is too long and unwieldy a spell to work into a fight when you could just stun the possessed person and then hit them with it. Especially since it is known to not always work with a single application. She puts together all of the clues, existing and new, for any reader who is still feeling shortchanged by Voldemort's sudden power-up. Next chapter does this with more detail, but that's an after-the-fact justification.

Voldemort reveals, in his victory, that he needed Harry and Percy alive for his plans. This was pretty much implied by them not being executed, but I figured he would want to monologue a bit and confirming that doesn't hurt. Don't worry Harry, Percy, it's not plot armor keeping you alive, it's Voldemort wanting to do this the way he planned despite the interruption! Percy, just… don't think about getting the Cedric treatment as the first thing Voldemort-in-Harry-body does.