They always had the same radio static in their heads. There was too much buzzing to bother with so usually he didn't. He just dispensed with it. Them. He dispensed them: their thoughts, the people themselves. He had not been able to clear his own thoughts otherwise he would have done it sooner and he did want to know what the fuss was about. But what had he even done? She was dead. That was her body. That was her wand. Could it have been the wand? She had said nothing of significance had she? He hadn't been listening too closely. Truth be told, he had more important things on his mind. The list of things he had to do grew and shrank with every curse, spell, deflection. It did cross his mind to ask her to join him but that was a passing thought, even whimsical. Her skills were wasted as on becoming an auror. She had chosen the wrong side. The sooner she died, the sooner he could attend to a number of other things. Right now the list was not chiefest amongst his thoughts, it was that insignificant, common wand.
He went in for a closer look. Dorcas' wand loosened from her grip and it too, like her, lay still on the ground. Lord Voldemort surveyed the scene. He glanced around and looked at her, then the wand, then her again and the wand again. He stepped closer. He did not understand what had just happened. She had asked him a question, right? What had he said? He felt uneasy at the lack of footing he possessed in the moment and the fury of not knowing started to creep into his mind. It would make his neck muscles tight and weigh him down at the shoulders later but now he could try to understand very quickly what had happened. He stared at the wand. It was insignificant alright but why hadn't he picked it up then? Why hadn't he gone to get it inspected at least? Severus might have assessed it, he certainly could do it himself but that would take too much time and to find out it was worthless? There was nothing in the lore that he could think of that would connect her to anything of any significance even her mythos was contemporary if you could even call it a myth. Give it a year and she would be all but forgotten, he told himself. Sooner than a year. But his walk out through the woods he could not. He could feel himself paving over the memory just by thinking of it. He could not get this exchange out of his mind, first because of its oddity and the confusion it inspired by him. He had not been confused or unsettled by magic in a very long time.
He had his back exposed for part of this exchange and she had done nothing. She would not have been able to do anything yet she could have tried. It was not as if she was too principled to cut someone to ribbons, he knew as much. So what was it, what had just happened? He visited old haunts as best as he could gathering information like an invisible, giant, silent magnet. Everything he needed would find its way to him because of the work he had done as a young man. All of his seeds would grow to trees and would bear everlasting fruit to the end of time. He was away longer than he anticipated but everything he needed to check, everything that could be confirmed was safe and in its proper place. He knew he did not have to explain anything and something like gratitude filled the space where his heart should have been. He felt relief that he did not have to lie because he did not have to explain. He could have said anything or nothing and who would question him? Part of the news preceded him anyway. War tended to do this, accelerate the speed in which information traveled. They said he killed her, another layer of information, another layer of the story. He could have gone back to London immediately after and the news would still have raced him and found a way there first.
Lord Voldemort had known all along but, to make that clear to himself, to understand what had happened, which he still did not, at least he knew that he had to admit to himself that he had not cast the spell that killed Dorcas Meadowes. He did not know what happened but no one else ever needed to know that. He knew that his accomplishments outweighed the death of one evasive ex-auror. He knew, had convinced himself that whatever had happened did not count for much now since she was dead. He had seen her go down. He knew almost by instinct, or by experience, that her body and the living part of her no longer occupied the same spaces. How that happened was irrelevant. He knew, he was reasonably sure, that she had no quiet skill that would allow her to come back. She was gone. He crossed off her name on the list in his mind.
