Snakes in Badgers' Clothing
May 2nd, 1998
Post-Hogwarts
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As Voldemort walked into what remained of the Great Hall, he gloated, "Harry Potter is dead. He was killed as he ran away, trying to save himself while you lay down your lives for him." Hagrid was made to lay Harry at Voldemort's feet. "We bring you his body as proof that your hero is gone. The battle is won!"
There was no time to grieve nor to process what they were hearing. Harry was gone but there was still work to be done. If Harry had failed, then it was up to all of them to do it for him. They had to save themselves.
A voice from above shouted, "NOW!" and blood filled balloons soared through the air. Some splattered on the ground, ineffective, but others hit their mark, splattering Voldemort and nearby Death Eaters. The balloons multiplied and popped on contact with
Voldemort cried out in pain as blood that splattered on his skin sizzled and burned. Smoke rose from the contact areas and all eyes shot to the ceiling and where Leilani teetered dangerously far over the edge of the wooden beam. The only thing that kept her from falling was Jo's hand fisted in the back of her belt. Leili stared, wide eyed, as Voldemort looked directly at them, his eyes slitting dangerously.
"Shit," Jo swore to herself. "How did he even find us up here?" she hissed.
And then howls of pain echoed through the hall. All eyes shot from the ceiling to the Death Eater on the ground doing his best impression of a living torch. Apparently, when one's groin was on fire, logical thought went fluttering merrily out the window. All he had to do was cast aguamenti and put the fire out—or if he had spent any time in a muggle school he would have known all about 'Stop. Drop. And Roll.' Instead he stood there, shrieking, and hitting the front of his robes to try and put it out. Leilani seized upon the opportunity she had created and shrank from girl to bird fast as she could.
Meanwhile, Jo hopped on to her broom as she jumped off the ceiling beam—she could do a similar trick with her bike, though not quite so dramatically.
Suddenly, an invisible hand seized Jo around her middle. It pinned her arms to her sides leaving her to try and steer the broom with her knees. Leili flew but with a wave of Voldemort's hand, she was forced out of her bird form. She yelped as she entered a free fall that Voldemort aborted in the knick of time. Rookwood had, in the scuffle, managed to put himself out—which everyone privately thought was unfortunate.
"You two…" Voldemort whispered, various places still smoldering from where Harry's blood had touched him. "Well, well, the two sssnakesss in badger'sss clothing," he hissed, bringing them upright and eyelevel. All the better for taunting.
"Coming from anyone else, that'd be a compliment!" Leili snapped back at him.
"After all your efforts to protect Potter, he dies at my hand. How will you ever live with yourselves?" Voldemort goaded.
Secretly still alive on the floor, Harry's mind reeled, he'd discovered that the two Hufflepuffs had helped out a lot over the years but his mind was still trying to make it all fit.
"Don't know what you're talking about," Jo challenged, her chin jutting out.
"Still playing your little game are you?" he laughed, a chilling laugh that rippled down Leili's spine, sending goosebumps down her arms. He turned to look out at the crowd; he glanced at the students and addressed them, "Do you want to know how much they have done for you?"
He turned back to the girls he still held in place with the hover charm. "Shall I divulge the extent of your participation? Shall I tell them exactly what happened four years ago? How you helped dear, sweet Harry Potter through the Tournament? Or should I go back further? Back, all the way to the beginning?"
"Oh, God, he's gonna monologue us to death," Jo interrupted. Voldemort glared at her, red eyes slitting further. "Oh, so scary."
"D'you really expect us to just whimper in fright over here?" Leilani asked, she was no Gryffindor but she had been dating Fred long enough to know how to fake it till she made it.
"Apparently, not too brigh—" Jo was cut off by a silencing charm cast by Bellatrix, who had gotten tired of listening to Jo yap.
"Well, that wasn't very nice, cutting a girl off mid-word like that." Leili seemed determined to piss these people off.
"You're one to talk about nice, girl," Voldemort said almost bemusedly.
Leili said under her breath, just loud enough to be heard, "If you're referring to Rookwood, he deserves it."
Leili's piercing scream echoed through the Great Hall as she was promptly hit with the Cruciatus curse. Rookwood hadn't known who'd set him on fire, but he did now.
Harry fought to keep his face impassive, he hated knowing she was in excruciating pain and not doing anything but he didn't see that he had a choice. If he helped her now, Voldemort would know he was still alive and he wasn't ready for that to happen yet. He gritted his teeth and steeled his nerves and made a mental note to apologize later.
"Hear how she screamsss!" Voldemort cried, a sick smile on his face as he hissed the last word.
The screaming stopped abruptly when Jo snagged a rock off the ground and hurled it at Rookwood's nose. A silent immobulus later the girls hung suspended, silently paralyzed and Voldemort returned to his speech.
"They don't want you to know what they've done. Modesty. How quaint. You've got two changelings living right under your nose, and you didn't even notice. Two sssnake eggsss hatched by a badger."
After a moment he turned his snake eyes on Leilani whose skin was prickling with tiny arcs of lightning again. No one had told her that even after the Cruciatus Curse had been lifted she would still hurt.
Not-Moody may have been an imposter, but it would have been nice if, while he was telling them about all the other nasty curses, he had mentioned the after-pain of crucio.
Voldemort's face turned euphoric, "I could use loyalty and power like yours, oh yes, I know about the lightning, and I know how you managed it. I could tell you how, you know. Join me and unlock the secrets of magic you've only dreamed of."
Leili glared, a thought from him and she was free to speak her answer, "Never," she panted, wishing she could curl up into a ball until the pain subsided—it was a miracle she hadn't passed out or thrown up. "I may not know exactly where my lightning comes from or how exactly it works but I will never join you, especially not to 'unlock' any 'secrets of magic'."
The look on his face soured, anger collected in the lines of his snarl, the sheer fact that she dared to reject him, it was galling!
"You could have joined me, I could have made you great, but instead you choose this, you choose them. And you," he turned to Jo with a disgusted sneer on his face, "Filthy mudblood, polluting the bloodlines."
Jo took exception to that. "I'm the mudblood in this situation? What about you? Your mother was a witch sure, but your Dad, he was a muggle." They'd learned Voldemort was half-blood in the chamber of secrets. Oh the blessings of remembering what seems like useless trivia after being attacked by a 50 year old memory. "And you know what? You're a major hypocrite! Looking down on me for being muggleborn but offering a halfblood a place in your little gang," she tsked.
"I told you some people have a bug up their butts about us," Leili reminded Jo.
"Can I kill it?"
"Working on it."
"Would somebody please get me a gun? Or a bazooka?" Those raised solely in wizarding society looked at each other in confusion, few knew what a gun was, even fewer a bazooka.
Voldemort's flat face turned livid, every snake-like feature contorting in anger. Then he realized they were distracting him again, though he didn't realize that they had seen Harry throw his invisibility cloak over himself, proving he was still alive.
He turned away from the girls and addressed the crowd, "Your precious champions… have been the driving force behind every victory. From the very beginning, they've been there, lurking; watching from the shadows."
"We did NOT lurk!" Leili objected.
"Yeah, actually we kinda did…" Jo muttered. They kept talking, trying to buy time for someone do something.
"Back in their third year, they coerced a favor out of your resident poltergeist. It was rather easy I believe, Peeves liking nothing better than annoying that squib. The favor was simple; he would distract Filch while dear Harry and his little mudblood friends made their getaway, and he could ask three things of them, each. Unfortunately, they stumbled across Hagrid's pet, instead of their beds," Voldemort tsked with a pointed smile directed at Ron and Hermione.
"The next year, I discovered they had an alliance with my own house. Of course, then I heard you two had—how did Remus put it again? Oh yes," he chuckled, "An unhealthy dependence on each other. I knew it would be simple to destroy you; like dominos, knock down one, the other will fall. Though I did not expect to have you show up at the graveyard the next year, let alone escape."
Leili turned to Jo, "That stupid rat!" she said, her upper lip curling at the reminder of Pettigrew.
"Tell me, how is your little dalliance these days?"
"The Slyther-Puff Alliance is dead," Jo monotoned.
He ignored her. Of course the so-called alliance had failed. Slytherin and Hufflepuff? Working together? It was absurd. "You failed to stop Draco from fixing the vanishing cabinet, you also failed to save Dumbledore, and now you've failed to save Severus and Potter."
He turned back to the gathered crowd, "Harry only managed to get through the Tournament with a bit of help, you see. They laced his morning goblet with Felix Felicis the morning of the first challenge, thus ensuring his success," he sounded highly amused.
"And then a full human transfiguration into a Grindylow before the second task and of course, you all saw what happened at the maze. They snatched the portkey and landed themselves in the graveyard. This one," he motioned to Jo, "was detrimental to my rebirth. Unfortunately they didn't want to stay for the party."
The Death Eaters laughed.
"And here's another little secret they've been keeping from you, it is in fact their best kept secret; I, myself, only discovered it recently, your precious, secretive, changeling champions are Animagi."
Leilani was torn between banging her head against a wall and strangling Voldemort. Jo, on the other hand, was itching to shift and use his head as a beach ball. How did he know all of this? Sure, some of it had come from Pettigrew but Peeves would never tell Voldemort anything. Unless Marcus had spilled the beans when he'd joined the Death Eaters. The thought hurt and rankled at Jo who had tired to forget him, but how could she? Even after everything, she was still in love with him.
"The Mudblood is a bear, and the Half-blood is a parrot." The death eaters laughed amongst themselves.
Leili opened her mouth and corrected him indignantly, "Lorikeet!"
Neville stood there listening, his brain scouring every time he'd run into Jo and Leilani over the years during a sticky situation, trying to pick apart the moments to see their handiwork underneath.
The one memory that stuck out the most was when they had returned Trevor to him on his first train ride to Hogwarts. Suddenly he burst from the crowd with a yell, Harry heard the scuffle and the shout, saw a flash of light through his closed lids as he lay on the ground, and heard Voldemort's laugh. He was flashing back to Halloween.
"And who is this? Who has volunteered to demonstrate what happens to those who continue to fight when the battle is lost?"
"It is Neville Longbottom, my Lord! The boy who has been giving the Carrows so much trouble! The son of the Aurors, remember?" Bellatrix supplied eagerly.
"Ah, yes, I remember. But you are pureblood, aren't you, my brave boy?"
Neville's back was straight, his head held high, the light in his eyes defiant as he said, "So what if I am?"
"You show spirit and bravery, and you come of noble stock. You will make a very valuable Death Eater. We need your kind, Neville Longbottom."
"I'll join you when hell freezes over. Dumbledore's Army!" there was a cheer from the crowd. Voldemort summoned the Sorting Hat and forced it onto the now-paralyzed boy's head.
While his attention was focused on Neville, Leili caught sight of George, who was sneaking around the Death Eaters and with a delightfully wicked grin, tossed a portable swamp at Voldemort's feet, yelling, "Swamp in the hole!"
The biggest, most foul smelling swamp he and Fred had ever created—likely influenced by a certain bog from a certain movie Fred and Leili, along with Marcus and Jo, had gone to see—burst into existence.
Then, many things happened at once, as students were throwing on bubblehead charms at the warning, Harry threw his invisibility cloak over himself and scrambled to his feet.
Neville broke the body-bind curse and withdrew the hat from his head and the sword from within it just as Nagini sprang towards him. In the midst of the chaos, the girls saw a flash of silver and the now headless snake dropped to the ground. And they reveled in the fact that the Death Eaters were choking on swamp gunk that was up to even Hagrid's ears.
After towing them out of the way, George canceled the hover charm. Jo looked at the swamp and then asked, "Hey, do you think we can do that with acid?"