A/N: A quick flick back into the Harry Potter fandom to post a story that I wrote well before HBP but never posted. I think that I must accept that I'm now entirely in the Artemis Fowl fandom.

Disclaimer: Not mine. It's never mine. Why would I even want to write something that would make me money?

Warnings: Dark, multiple character deaths

Vanquish

"Hope can be found even in the most desperate of situations, if we only remember to turn on the light…"
- Albus Dumbledore – Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ...

Harry did not come quietly.

He had crept within range using his Invisibility Cloak and then started taking pot-shots at the guards. Nine went down – permanently, because even the light side had stopped using non-lethal curses years ago – before he was discovered. Another thirteen fell under his wand before they managed to disarm him. Two suffered broken noses, another was spitting teeth, and three more had been caught by Cruciatus curses from their own comrades by the time they managed to subdue him with a well-aimed curse.

By that stage, he was losing blood from several places, gasping for breath, and quite sure that his left shoulder was dislocated, but all that pain vanished under the all-consuming agony of the Cruciatus. The pain crashed over him in waves, always intensifying, always growing, getting ever greater as he continued his weak struggles almost instinctively.

"Please, Potter," sneered Lestrange as she lifted the curses and left Harry twitching helplessly on the ground. "Don't be absurd. You walked up to the gates of the Dark Lord's fortress – you can't have been expecting to get away with this."

Harry ignored her, bucking and twisting against his captors again, too high on adrenaline and rage to be stopped by reason or even by the splitting agony that shot through his shoulder at the tiniest movement.

Lestrange sighed. "As you wish," she said. "Stupefy!"

Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ...

He awoke with a gasp and struggled to his feet, scrambling for his wand and attempting to work out where he was. The vaulted sky-like ceiling of what had once been the Great Hall of Hogwarts stretched above him and the Death Eaters lined the wall of the vast chamber, each with their wands out and pointed at him.

A sudden hysterical memory of seeing a Muggle firing squad on television appeared in Harry's brain and he wondered irrelevantly if he would be allowed to ask for a blindfold. Then his eyes found Voldemort, reclining smugly on his self-fashioned throne and examining Harry's wand, and he knew instantly that he would be lucky to receive even his one request. It would have to be good old-fashioned eyelids then.

"On your knees before the Dark Lord, Potter!" demanded Lestrange from the end of the row.

Quashing the instinctive urge to resist, Harry dropped to his knees, bowing his head submissively. The time for fighting was over.

Voldemort's thin, bloodless lips curved in a smile as he twirled Harry's wand in his fingers. "Now that, Harry, is a sight for sore eyes. The one thing I have never received from any of your comrades. Have you finally come to surrender?"

Harry did not respond. None of the words on the tip of his tongue, however appropriate they seemed, would get him what he wanted, so he thought it best to remain silent.

"It is of no matter," said Voldemort dismissively. "The werewolf you have come to rescue is already dead. I tortured him for hour after hour until he was sobbing for mercy, but I kept on going until his mind broke and hid from the pain. Even then, when he could not understand the pain or comprehend who I was, I tortured him until his animal's heart burst with the strain. You have arrived too late – even if you had any possibility of being able to rescue him – and this time, you will die."

And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ...

Harry smiled regretfully as the news solidified this last decision in his mind. "We 'fools' who love each other," he said placidly, "will always sacrifice ourselves for one another."

"Do you not understand yet, Harry?" Voldemort demanded. "You cannot kill me! Not with your wand in hand, not with your Muggle guns, not with an army of Aurors at your back! I am invincible!"

To emphasise the point, he lifted Harry's wand in both hands and slowly bent it. Harry's soul felt like it was bending, too, and they shattered together with a sharp crack and a shower of splinters. Harry wasn't sure if he'd restrained a flinch or not, although he supposed it didn't matter. His pride seemed to be such a ridiculous thing to hang on to, on his knees in front of the Dark Lord, at the end of all things.

"There are fates worse than death, Tom," he said finally. "Living in this world with you, I have come to understand, is one of those fates."

It was the truth. After Dumbledore's death the war had begun in earnest and the lives it had claimed were far too high a price to pay for anything at all.

It was the last week, however, that had made up Harry's mind that being alive was no longer tolerable. The Death Eaters had struck without warning while Hermione was alone with baby Geoffrey, Harry's godson. Hermione's mind snapped under the weight of Imperius as she was forced to smother her infant son against her own breast; Ron had stormed the gates of what had once been Hogwarts on his own not three days later and taken out thirty Death Eaters before they had finally brought him down. It had been only Remus' Full Body Bind that had stopped Harry from going with him. Now, however, there was no one – no one – left who could stop him from following his friends and family into the Dark Lord's lair and into death.

"Crucio!"

And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives ...

Harry struggled back to his knees again minutes, perhaps hours, after succumbing to the all-consuming pain. "I am here for one thing alone," he said calmly. "To ask you to do me a favour. I would have done it myself, but – you know – it must be by the hand of the other and all that."

Voldemort began to laugh his high, chilling laugh, as though every absent Christmas he had spent in the Orphanage had finally come. The laugh died away, slowly, and he narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

"I've not the slightest intention of killing you," he said, his tone dripping with malice. "I can lock you away for the rest of your life! You will never see the sun again and, in time, you'll forget even your own name!"

"You know you won't do that," replied Harry meekly. "I'd still be surviving and you know as well as I do what the Prophecy says. You get to go on with your pitiful half-life until you grow tired of toying with me. The sooner you kill me, the sooner you can start in on the rest of your life."

Voldemort considered that carefully. "Perhaps you are right, Potter," he said finally. "But don't think I trust you in the least. Drop your mental shields let me into your mind – then we will see what the real plan is."

Harry raised his head sadly and met the Dark Lord's eyes, completely unprotected, and let his love for his friends, family, and mentor come to the surface. The bittersweet hope that he might see them again in the beyond was nearly crushed by the grief and despair at their absence that permeated every part of his mind. Only one clear thought surfaced out of the jumble of emotions: I've already lost too much. I'm already defeated.

Voldemort flinched as he encountered the unfamiliar emotions, but pushed through to investigate Harry's motivations. Harry allowed the Dark Lord in, showing him memory after memory of pain and suffering: watching, helpless, as Sirius fell in a graceful curve through the veil; Dumbledore's death at the hand of the traitor; Hagrid's death; Colin's betrayal; Mrs. Weasley's funeral; Ginny – oh, Ginny, I'm sorry!; Seamus the Weasley twins; Luna; Neville; Tonks; the inexorable destruction of every good thing in his life… The memories and emotions rolled on, showcasing the utter wretchedness of his failure as he arrived in response to Hermione's call for help, only to find his tiny godson already dead; not being able to track the shattered mother down until just too late to prevent her suicidal leap from a sixth-story car-park; of lying stiffly in Remus' consoling arms as the man apologised over and over again despite the Full Body Bind that prevented even Harry's tear ducts from functioning as he watched his best friend's death through his mortal enemy's eyes; arranging Ron and Hermione's personal effects for their memorial service and the point where he realised that, besides himself and Remus, there was no one left to attend and he thought that his heart must surely explode with the overwhelming grief…

Voldemort pulled out of Harry's memories, looking as though he might as well have been putting his bare hand into a pile of still-warm dragon-dung. His mind appeared to be made up as he raised his wand to point at Harry's chest.

"Your dependence on your friends has made you weak," he sneered, "and you no longer amuse me. Lord Voldemort will grant your request. Avada Kedavra!"

Harry had heard of the expression 'to look death in the face' before, but he had never imagined that he would ever be doing so quite so literally. He looked up at the face of his foe, staring down the length of the wand and feeling alive – really alive – for the first time in his life. Then he let his eyes flutter closed, allowing his mind to focus on the sensation of his last moments of life. He felt somehow too large for his skin, filling it right to the edges and almost bursting with the need to overflow it and merge with the bright, living day pictured on the ceiling. The stone floor was a spreading chill through his knees, the wool of his beloved Weasley jumper scratchy against his neck and in this moment there was no pain, no grief, and no suffering, only wonder at the joy and beauty of simply living.

Then the curse connected and snuffed out that life. Not like a candle, no, for when a candle is snuffed out, something of the fire remains in the warmth of the melted wax, the momentary glow of the wick, the smoke… Harry felt the life within him instantaneously evaporate, going in that instant from present to absent, from alive to… well, dead.

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies...

Dead, but not vanquished, thought Harry as he drifted into the darkness beyond. It had not occurred to any of them, save Hermione, that to be vanquished was not necessarily the same as to be dead. Killing the figurehead of a group without first discrediting them did not count as vanquishing if that person continued to command their cause as a martyr; vanquishing implied something that was somehow more complete than mere death.

Harry was relieved that Voldemort had not continued searching his mind past that explosion of grief in Hermione's office. His tiny hope that the utter despair would be too much for Voldemort to stand had been borne out; the Dark Lord had not continued his examination past the point where the hailstorm of weeping had passed and he had noticed a pile of parchment, awkwardly hidden under a hurried Illusion Charm.

He had dispelled the charm and glanced disinterestedly down at the top sheet, until the words at the top of the page caught his eye. It was the Prophecy, carefully written with annotations on precise word meanings all over it and… an idea.

It seemed that Hermione hadn't dared to mention her idea to Harry in case he had done something rash (which he had to admit, he probably would have) but nothing stopped Hermione from doing the research thoroughly. As Harry turned page after page, Hermione's usually neat printing had grown more and more illegible in her haste to confirm her horrifying, but effective idea.

The Prophecy did not specify that the one who died was the same as the one who was vanquished; it said only that one of them would die and that Harry had the power to do the vanquishing. If Voldemort had only done a little more research on the dark resurrection spell he had used to regain corporeal form, if he had realised what Hermione had discovered, he would have ordered Harry to be given the Dementor's Kiss or simply held as a prisoner forever no matter what the Prophecy said.

The body Voldemort had fashioned for himself from the components of bone, flesh, and blood had become his own and would remain even after the death of his donors.

Magic, however, was a living thing, a precious stream of power that he had needed to continually leech from his living donors. Voldemort's father was long dead and a Muggle anyway. He had killed Pettigrew the year before in a fit of pique at constantly having his orders questioned, which meant…

It was possible. It was a gamble. There would be no going back. Hermione had never been wrong before, though, not about something involving books and research. And when Harry had discovered that Remus had been captured, his decision had been made. There was nothing left for him in this world.

Hermione's notes had said that the power to defeat the Dark Lord had been there all along – his 'saving people thing' as she called it, his 'self-sacrificing compassion' as Dumbledore would have said. Perhaps the late unlamented Professor Snape would have called it 'Gryffindor stupidity'. Harry knew, deep down, that it was less bravery than simply the inability to face going on after losing everything.

He had informed the Aurors that he had found a way to defeat the Dark Lord and asked them to attack on his heels to take out the remaining Death Eaters and prevent anyone else from stepping into the power vacuum. Somehow – deep down inside – he knew that it had worked. He had won, after all, even if the Auror assault failed and the Dark Lord's power was intact, because he would have everyone who had been taken from him back again; the rest would join him soon enough.

The image of a cracked stone archway formed tantalisingly before his eyes, the tattered black veil that hung from its peak rippling softly, welcomingly. Harry smiled and cocked his head to one side to better hear the whispers of well-loved voices beckoning him beyond.

He didn't even look back to see the vanquished Dark Lord shaking his now useless wand in confusion as he stepped through to join his friends and family.

A/N: I'd like to make it clear, this is not (not!) what I believe JK Rowling will do. If she kills Harry, I will be Most Seriously Displeased. And I love Snape, and I don't believe he was a traitor, but that wasn't worth working in. This was just – an idea I had about a slightly different interpretation of the prophecy, and it wouldn't go away. Begone, demon plotbunny!

Now I've written it. Not my best work: I'm sure it's missing something, but I can't put my finger on what - perhaps it's just Harry's fire, which doesn't fit into a fic where he's so broken. Anyway, I've been trying to work that out for well over a year, now, so if anyone's got any ideas, do let me know.

Thanks go to Amazing Iviolinist, my beta reader and dear friend, for putting up with my long sentences and even longer absenses.