For all his bluster and grandstanding, the one emotion the great Lord Voldemort felt with terrible abundance in his final moments was dread.

When his greatest rival—not the wise and powerful wizard fifty years his senior, whose death he had arranged a year previous, but rather the seventeen-year-old boy who had survived his lethal attacks thrice now—appeared before him in the Great Hall… he honestly wasn't even surprised at this point. He leveled a few uninspired taunts at the boy almost reflexively, but his thoughts were in the forest where he had apparently naively believed Harry Potter to finally be dead. After all, when the boy had presented himself in that clearing, he had seemed accepting of his death. Boldly accepting, certainly but he had not even struggled or resisted, freely allowing himself to be killed.

In a sense, Voldemort couldn't help but uneasily reflect, Potter had already surpassed him in that single capacity, the ability to accept his death. A weakness, he insisted, forcing down other rebellious thoughts. The strongest refuse to accept death, and they survive. This was the defining moment of his life, where he proved that maxim, where he struck down his mortal enemy once and for all and officially began living his eternity. Someday, Harry Potter would be no more than a distant memory of a mortal life long since left behind.

But then, the Killing Curse hit the boy and they both collapsed.

That was the instant he knew with utmost certainty that he had already lost two wars, one against Dumbledore and his pawns and one against the very universe itself.

He picked himself up moments later and stared warily at Potter's prone form, already knowing in his heart but refusing to accept that the boy was still alive.

Narcissa Malfoy had knelt down and checked and confirmed that the boy was dead, and he had pretended—to himself, as much as to anyone else—that he believed her. An act of treachery on her part, he reflected dully, but could he really blame her for it? He had been raised in a Muggle orphanage, a British Muggle orphanage in the '30s. He was well aware of how people tended to react when someone returned from the dead. The boy was pretty much already a Messiah. Perhaps future generations would canonize Narcissa for her efforts that morning.

No matter the how or the why, the boy was standing there before him in blatant defiance of everything that Voldemort believed in.

In these last few moments, he at least still had the stubbornness—the gall, really—to refer to Potter's continued survival as 'accidents' when he knew damn well that it was fate. Of course, it had nothing to do with the prophecy, with a child born at the end of July and so on and so forth.

It had everything to do with audaciously presuming to say 'no' to the natural order of the universe. Death was coming. It was coming for everything, and some like Potter apparently possessed what Voldemort now could only grudgingly admit was the true strength it took to accept it.

He had spent most of his life seeking immortality. He studied for years before he finally triumphantly discovered the potential of Horcruxes, and then he had spent decades acquiring the means to create Horcruxes that were worthy of him—six Horcruxes, plus one piece of his soul residing within his body to make seven pieces of soul total, an immensely powerful magical number. Through these steps, he would become truly invincible.

But then, Snape had delivered to him word of the prophecy, of a boy with a mysterious power that he could use to defeat him, and he had been consumed by anxiety. Best just to kill the boy while he was still an infant, he had thought. It didn't matter that he was one Horcrux short of perfect invincibility. He was off to kill two twenty-one-year-olds and a baby. Even if the prophecy was a sham, killing all three of them before the boy could hope to become a threat was obviously the safest course of action.

After many years in hiding in Albania, he had puzzled out exactly what went wrong. Ridiculous mother's love, creating a shield that reflected the Killing Curse—a curse that it was supposed to be impossible to block—back at him.

It really was very, very ridiculous by any metric. But then again, one might call that a warning. "Whatever you may do to avoid your death," the universe seemed to dispassionately inform him, "shall only contrive the circumstances which cause it."

But he had so foolishly ignored that warning and tried again. And he would regret that for the rest of his—well. At least he wouldn't regret it for very long.

The exact circumstances hardly mattered. Potter didn't even deign to explain how he had survived the Killing Curse—though judging from earlier patterns, Voldemort was sure that it was somehow his own fault in the end.

Instead, Potter focused on expounding exactly how he was going to defeat Voldemort. He was in unusually good form. Usually, the best he could do were small acts of defiance, but today, he was positively verbose, going into great detail about how Voldemort had dug his own grave.

Voldemort cut a rather pathetic figure in comparison, and he was well aware of it. The words which usually flowed so easily from his tongue burst out of him in emotional displays. But he was just so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he could hardly bring himself to care about how he had so grievously misjudged Snape, how Dumbledore had played him for a fool, and how Malfoy's little brat of a son factored into it all.

Because—he was going to die. His life was going to end at seventy-one years old, barely middle-aged for a wizard and just average for a Muggle, which somehow made it so much worse.

"So it all comes down to this, doesn't it?" the boy whispered, echoing Voldemort's thoughts. "Does that wand in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does… I am the true master of the Elder Wand."

Orange light from the rising sun suddenly spilled in from the window and—no, no! This was it! He—he wasn't ready yet, what even would be his final words?

"Avada Kedavra!"

A terrible choice.

And those were the anticlimactic final thoughts of a foolish old man named Tom Riddle.


Thank you very much for reading.

I think Voldemort's story is really very karmic in a way, and I thought it would be cool to write his final moments reframed around that context.

Please favorite if you enjoyed and leave me a review letting me know what you thought.