Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling and will never claim to be, except perhaps in jest on Halloween. I did not create any of the characters you will see in the following story, which is appropriately called a fanfic. This extrapolation on what might happen in the future of J.K. Rowling's Wizarding Britain is just an absurd collection of some strange and fluffy nothings that were floating around in my head. Enjoy.
Godric's Hollow.
The 25th anniversary of the deaths of Lilly and James Potter.
Twenty-five years after the Boy Who Lived lived.
Three years after the fall of the Ministry of Magic.
Two years after the fall of Hogwarts.
One year after the Boy Who Lived lived yet again.
A year of suppressing tiny revolutions and stamping out rumors that the Boy Who Lived would return and save them all had exhausted His Darkness, the Supreme Lord Voldemort more than all of the previous years combined. His age, counting the years spent without a body, was beginning to show, and the Dark Lord could feel his powers waning. He was not pleased. And yet, despite all of that, his powers were still unparalleled. He was sure he had a good thirty years before even his strongest Death Eater could rival him, and he was sure he could reverse, or at least stop, the degenerative process before then. But, in the meantime, there was the Boy Who Lived
Nobody quite knew where H. J. Potter had disappeared to after escaping the Dark Lord during the massacre of the Order of the Phoenix. And that was, to the letter, the one thing preventing Lord Voldemort from complete and absolute control over the British wizarding world—the idiotic people kept expecting Potter to swoop in and save them! Not that the Death Eaters were any better: Voldemort had the sneaking suspicion that his own loyal servants mocked his authority in their deepest thoughts, thinking, "This old man can't even kill a boy who's been in his grasp ten times—how can he order me about?" Actually, he knew they thought that. He was, after all, a Legillimens.
So, anyway, Voldemort was "holding court," as the newspapers called it, at Godric's Hollow. It was more of a press conference than a true Death Eater meeting, as he was currently accepting questions, which he didn't, as a rule, generally allow. But, when one is a Supreme Dark Lord, one occasionally has to quiet concerns of the people.
"Mister Riddle," called one reporter, wearing, for some unfathomable reason, a checkered fedora on his head, "what do you think—"
"Avada Kedavra!"
A flash of green light.
The fedora-wearing reporter fell over, lifeless. The other reporters paused for a moment in their reporter-frenzy. Voldemort smiled.
"You may address me…" he said softly, "properly, or you shall meet the same fate as this man with the ridiculous hat."
The silence lasted another split second, and then persistent reporter Rita Skeeter raised a green quill pen.
"Your Supreme Darkness," she purred, "what do you have to say about the fact that your people have failed to capture Harry Potter?"
Cursed reporters. Of course, they wanted to know about H. J. Potter, their little savior who they insisted on affectionately calling "Harry," despite the fact that the young man had legally (and magically) changed his name to "H. J." more than five years before. And then the annoyingly numerous quill-bearing terrors liked to sugarcoat the truth, calling the Death Eaters his "people". Didn't they understand that he'd taken over Great Britain? What was being avoided by not calling them Death Eaters?
The Dark Lord glared at her before asking softly, in the dangerous voice that made even Death Eaters tremble in fear, "Mz. Skeeter, what are you saying?"
"She's saying," a worn-out voice replied, "that nobody's accepted you as Supreme Lord of anything, Tom, because they're still expecting me to save them."
The horde of reporters turned to the pale, gaunt young man with the haunted green eyes who had appeared behind them and exclaimed in one voice, "Harry!"
"H. J., actually," he responded, brushing his long, unkempt dark hair away from his eyes. "I changed it nearly six years ago, y'know."
"Harry!" they exclaimed again, in half-worshipful tones. H. J. glanced up at Voldemort, who was fuming behind the podium.
"Well, Tom, it's been a while," he said.
"Why have you come here?" the Dark Lord managed to hiss between clenched teeth. "Do you have a death wish, Potter? I am sure I can arrange that for you."
"Do you really want to know?" H. J. asked as he walked through the sea of completely-silent-for-once-because-they-were-awe-struck reporters, and climbed the stairs to the dias where Voldemort had been speaking. "Well, Tom, I'm sick of it all."
"You've gone mad, Potter."
"No, no, I'm serious," H. J. insisted. "This is bloody ridiculous. You've overthrown the Ministry, killed millions of innocent people, demolished the Order of the Phoenix, and people still think I'm going to pop out of nowhere and sacrifice everything to stop you so they can get back to their lives."
"Aren't you?" one reporter asked. "You did just pop out of nowhere." Without looking, Voldemort pointed his wand at the man, who died in a jet of green light.
"What's your point, Potter?" he demanded.
H. J. shrugged. "Well, since all my allies are dead and you pretty much rule Britain, I figured, hey, Tom's pretty much won—I just have to wait a bit longer until people calm down, accept his rule, and move on with their lives, and then maybe I'll get some plastic surgery to get rid of this scar, change my name, get married, and lead a semi-normal life. But no, the Boy Who Lived isn't dead, and the general public won't accept their fate, so I can't live any kind of life, especially not in disguise."
Voldemort shook his head. "Pathetic, Potter. You still let that Gryffindor complex rule your life. Now I suppose you're going to try to kill me—and fail again."
"Isn't that my line?" H. J. asked, green eyes crinkling with amusement. "No, no,my plan doesn't actually include an attempt to kill you. I thought about joining you—"
Both the Dark Lord and H. J. cringed.
"—repulsive as the thought may be, but decided that ultimately, people would think that I was just doing it to get close enough to kill you, so I threw that idea out. Of course, I'm kind of trapped, since you decided to tell people about the prophecy, so I can't expect them to forget about me."
"I didn't authorize any release of the prophesy to the media. I thought you did," the Dark Lord exclaimed, affronted. "I certainly would not have put myself in this bind of not being able to control my empire because the people still hope you're going to kill me. Not that you can."
"Well, if you didn't tell and I didn't tell, then who did?"
"If I may…"
"WHAT!" demanded the two enemies in unison, turning on the dark, hook-nosed man who had spoken.
"My lord, Potter," Severus Snape addressed the two, "before Dumbledore died, he told me in confidence that he had entrusted the exact wording of the prophesy to Rebeus Hagrid."
"The half-giant?" the Dark Lord wondered aloud.
"Anybody who could catch him unsuspecting could have gotten that out of him," H. J. groaned.
"Wasn't he killed a year ago?" Voldemort inquired.
"Two years ago," H. J. corrected him. "June the twenty-second."
"Ah, at the fall of Hogwarts," the Dark Lord recalled. "That was a glorious day. Almost as glorious as the day we destroyed the Order of the Phoenix."
H. J.'s eyes clouded over in remembered grief. "Minerva, Remus, Seamus, Ginny, Hermione, Neville, and Luna."
"What?"
"The Order members who were killed that day."
"You've memorized their death days?" Snape asked, half-fascinated, half-horrified.
"August the thirteenth, Molly and Arthur Weasley; August the twenty-seventh, Charlie Weasley; October the thirty-first, Cho Chang, and Percy, Ron, and Bill Weasley; December the sixteenth, Padma Patil; March the ninteenth, Fred and George Weasley; today, —" he paused, then finished in a much quieter voice, "James and Lilly Potter."
"Impressive, but I am not interested in a continuance of this rendition of your losses. Why did you come here today?"
H. J. looked at the Dark Lord in surprise.
"What, didn't I say? I'm sick of this all. I'd end it myself, but people would never believe it. So I came here. Think of it as my last contribution to world peace—when everybody believes that I'm gone, they'll quit expecting someone to save them."
Voldemort stared at him.
"Damnit, Tom, I want you to kill me!" H. J. exclaimed. He took out his wand, broke it in half, and threw the pieces at Voldemort's feet. "Do it already!"
In front of a crowd of dumbstruck reporters, the Dark Lord raised his wand. H. J. Potter took a deep breath and squared his shoulders, facing his lifelong enemy. Voldemort paused.
"What now?" H. J. groaned. "I don't have a wand, you've got an audience so there can be no doubt that I'm dead, and I'm literally asking you to kill me. What can possibly be wrong now?"
"It just feels wrong," the Dark Lord complained. "I'm supposed to capture you, torture you, and give a long-winded monologue."
"During which I escape," H. J. continued, shaking his head. "I can't go on with this hideous cycle, Tom. Kill me already and get on with conquering the world and whatever else it is that Dark Lords tend to do."
"But I didn't get my monologue," he complained.
"Hell," said Severus Snape, stepping forward and raising his own wand, "I can't take much more of this." He pointed his wand directly at the Dark Lord's chest. "Avada Kedavra!"
The reporters gasped as Voldemort fell over, dead as a dormouse that has been repeatedly bludgeoned with a heavy wooden bat, smashed, and put through a grinder.
Severus raised his wand again and pointed it at H. J., who didn't look at all surprised that Severus had just killed his sworn lord and master.
"Sorry about everything," he said. "Good luck with ruling the world and all. If anyone can do it, it's the Half-Blood Prince."
"Avada Kedavra!"
A flash of green light.
H. J. Potter, the Boy Who Lived Too Many Bloody Times, fell over dead at the feet of Severus Snape, the new Dark Lord.
The Dark Lord stepped over the dead bodies and approached the podium.
"All of you are to leave at once and report these events exactly to the public. Anyone who fails to report accurately will be thrown to the Dementors."
There was a mass exodus of reporters scrambling to get back to their printing rooms before they forgot a single detail.
Severus smiled. Godric's Hollow was completely empty but for the Dark Lord and the few dead bodies scattered about.
"It was I who released the exact wording of the prophesy to the public," he said. "Itforced both Potter and Riddle to continue in a stalemate in order to allow me time to weaken Riddle enough for me to remove him from his position of power. The world has been harsh to the Half-Blood Prince. Ihave been plotting to seize control of the wizarding world since before I joined the Death Eaters..."
Above, two insubstantial spirits drifted, watching the Dark Lord unravel his devious plan from its very beginnings as he spoke to the empty village of Godric's Hollow.
"He killed me," Voldemort exclaimed.
"Soliloquies, Tom, soliloquies," H. J. said, shaking his head.
"He killed me," Voldemort repeated in shock.
The two spirits watched a while longer, then Tom Riddle asked, "What now?"
"Dunno," Harry Potter replied. "Want to drift around the earth for a bit before seeking whatever comes next?"
"Probably hell, if there is one," Tom replied morosely. "I never planned to die, so I never much thought about the afterlife."
"Yeah," Harry said. "So…drift?"
"Drift," Tom agreed, and the spirits allowed themselves to drift away from Godric's Hollow and the Dark Lord that would be better than Voldemort could have been.
"Soliloquies, huh?" Tom asked aloud.
"Definitely," Harry nodded. "You coulda killed me, bam, second time."
"Soliloquies," Tom repeated. "Soliloquies."