A/N: And it's all over, guys. Which is kind of sad, because I've really enjoyed writing this one. Thanks for those of you who stuck with it, and thanks to the new readers and for anyone who reviewed, even if it was to tell me that my story was stupid.

THIRTEEN

Darkness loomed over the graveyard by the time Ginny, Pansy and their group arrived. It was ten to six and it seemed almost as though the air itself knew of the confrontation that was about to happen it was so thick with tension. Every member of their group had donned blood red robes for the occasion, at Luna's insistence and Snape and Malfoy's disgust. Even Pansy wasn't pleased about wearing the Gryffindor colours, but she at least took comfort in the fact that the colour could just as easily stand for the red plumage of a true thunderbird, or even for Ginny's flaming hair. Ginny, for her part, approved of Luna's choice. No matter what the colour, she was glad that they had something to join them together, to make them a united front rather than a ragtag bunch of teenagers and an ex-spy.

They made their way slowly and silently across the graveyard, weaving through the headstones, until they reached the small clearing which Harry recognized all too well. It seemed only fitting, after all, that Lord Voldemort would die in the place he had risen to life.

Ginny gave Pansy's hand one last squeeze before stepping forward alongside Harry. Pansy stood with the others, arrayed in a line ten feet behind with their wands at the ready. Harry and Ginny didn't make the slightest move to retrieve their own wands; they wouldn't be needed for the battles that these two had ahead.

Hermione and Ron stood together, their fingers intertwined loosely, drawing strength and courage from the contact. They didn't speak, or even look at each other, but they each knew that the other had their back, that they would kill for each other, that they would die for each other. Not that it would come to that, of course, if all went to plan.

Neville gripped his wand as though it were the last thing anchoring him to life and it would be easy to mistake the tremble in his legs as fear. But one only had to look at the expression on his face to realize that it was excitement and determination; determination to win, determination to end this war once and for all. Strangely, it was the exact same look on Snape's face. Even the most different of people, it seemed, could agree at least on this.

Luna was smiling. She stood next to Draco, their white blond hair bright against their robes, making them look almost like siblings in the half light. But there was none of Luna's hope to be found in Draco; he fully expected to die tonight. He wasn't happy about it but he knew that it was the least that he deserved. He was the only one of the group who really had nothing to look forward to after this battle. Should he survive, he would be going straight to Azkaban for murder. No, this fight was his last hurrah. A chance to make things right before he died. It was the most Gryffindor thing he had ever done in his life, and yet he couldn't seem to find it in himself to care all that much.

None of them showed any sign that they had noticed the not-so subtle attempts of almost the entire Order of the Phoenix to sneak up behind them, but that didn't mean a thing. They were hiding behind gravestones, for crying out loud. Sure, they were all disillusioned, but they must have thought they were idiot children for all the precautions they took. After about five minutes, Snape sighed.

"I'll do it, then," he muttered, annoyed. Turning, he swept away from the group, his robes billowing behind him. He strode up to the nearest graveyard and grabbed a handful of whichever unlucky person happened to be hiding behind it. The yelp and the fact that she nearly tripped over identified her easily.

"Nymphadora," Severus snarled, "Take the rest of the god-forsaken Order and get out. We told you not to come. We do not need your help. Our plan will not work if the others have to worry about your safety as well as their own. Leave."

With that, he threw her to the ground and strode back to his place in the line to resume waiting for his old master to appear. Harry glanced back at him.

"Do you think they'll actually leave?" he asked quietly, eyes darting over the graveyard.

"Of course not. But they are retreating at least."

Harry's brow wrinkled.

"How do you know?" he asked, "I can't see a thing."

"I am both older and wiser and far better at everything than you, Mr Potter," Snape sneered, though there was an edge of humour to his voice. "And you would do well to remember it."

Harry snorted and faced front once more. Some of the tension had eased out of his body with the short exchange, but one look at Ginny brought it pouring back in. He wasn't even sure that she had noticed anything going on, she looked so focused. Her back was hunched forward slightly, and her eyes were lighter than usual. Her power was pulsing around her angrily, fluorescent in the darkness of the evening. She was an animal about to attack and Harry was not sure that he had ever seen anything so dangerous. And considering the amount of times he had come face to face with Voldemort, that really was saying something.

"Harry Potter," a voice hissed from the darkness in front of him and Harry's eyes snapped forwards.

"Harry Potter," a second voice whispered and then, just as suddenly as if they had apparated in, he was face to face with two Voldemorts.

"Tom," he greeted the men, resisting the urge to go for his wand. It would do him no good, but old habits die hard. The Dark Lords hissed with anger, but Harry wasn't paying much attention to them at this second. He was peering over their shoulders, trying to make out shapes in the darkness. He couldn't see a single Death Eater, but as Snape had proved when he knew where the Order was, that did not mean they weren't there.

"Where are your little Death Eaters then, Tommy?" Harry asked cockily, "I would have thought you'd want plenty of back up. Or did you just not want anybody to witness your defeat?"

"You dare!" One Voldemort snapped, whilst the other fingered his wand and gnashed his teeth together in anger. "I am going to kill you, foolish boy, and then I will kill all of your friends, all of their families and lastly every single mudblood in this country. And as for my followers… Come forward!"

This last was a shouted command, answered by a ragged cheer as more than a hundred figures in the robes of the Death Eaters surged forward into the clearing. Behind him, Harry could hear the others beginning to chant. There was a click as the glass wall fell into place, the signal to let Harry know that he had five minutes to stall for. Five minutes to stop either Ginny or Voldemort from making their move.

"Let's kill them, my lord," one figure snarled from the front line. He had a hungry look in his eyes, but that was all Harry could tell through the mask.

"Ah, ah, ah," Harry chided before either Voldemort could respond, "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"And why not?" Both Riddles asked simultaneously. That was beginning to freak Harry out a little bit. It was sort of like being in the same room as the twins. Uncanny.

"Because you have no idea what you've done, you foolish boy," Harry said, using Voldemort's earlier words.

"And what, do tell, have I done?" They asked, "Was it kill your parents, by any chance? Was it kill Albus Dumbledore? Sirius Black? Oh, I notice Neville Longbottom is here, his parents were tortured into insanity in my name, you know. And the Weasley's… I killed their uncles. Severus Snape, I killed his one true love. And, of course, dear Draco. I killed his mother in front of him. So you see, Harry Potter, I have a good idea of what I have done."

Voldemort's grin was sickening. His followers were laughing and jeering behind him and Harry felt his blood rising. Three more minutes… only three more minutes and then they would all die. The chanting continued behind them. Harry risked a glance at Ginny and immediately regretted it; she was poised to kill. Her hair was whipping around her face in a wind that didn't touch the rest of them and claws were growing in place of her fingers. The feathered earring that had started this entire thing seemed to be growing out of her neck now, and even in the second that Harry allowed himself to watch, more feathers began to sprout out of her skin. Just three more minutes, that's all she had to last.

"Oh no, you don't. You know who you've killed, sure, although quite a few of those weren't actually by your hand, but you don't know what you've done."

"Tell me then, almighty Harry Potter," One Voldemort began.

"What have I done?" the second finished. They were still smiling. Harry hated that they were smiling.

"You took our blood!" he announced happily, forcing his anger not to show in his voice. He needed them distracted from what the others were doing, he needed them disoriented. "You took my blood twice! You took her blood without even knowing what she is! You would think that you, the great Dark Lord Voldemort, wouldn't make a mistake as stupid as that, but you did!"

The jeers died down from the crowd and both Voldemort's narrowed their eyes. Harry could tell that they wanted to know what he meant, but didn't want to show weakness in front of their Death Eaters. Two more minutes…

"I may be the Chosen One, you see, the one of the prophecy, but I couldn't have done it without you. I mean, if you hadn't acted on the prophecy I guess it really wouldn't have changed anything. You'd still be about to die. But Ginny would be alone up here and I wouldn't get to partake in this honour."

"Enough!"

"Kill them!"

Harry cursed under his breath, he had needed thirty more seconds but all still might not be lost if… The first curse flew, a streak of shining green against the evening sky, and missed. Missed Harry and Ginny, anyway. A crash of glass behind them told them that the others were safe from that curse at least, but just as Harry was about to turn and see if they had managed to get the shield up in time, Ginny exploded.

"I, um, sort of have a theory about that as well." Harry's voice was sheepish and hesitant, though his eyes showed a strange sort of confidence. It was as if he knew his theory was sound but he was sure the others would not believe him.

"What is it?" Hermione prompted.

"Well, I don't know how many of the rest of you can, I'm guessing definitely Pansy, but I can see Ginny's power. Her Thunderbird power I mean."

Draco raised his eyebrows at this, but Pansy and Severus nodded in agreement while Luna smiled as though she had known this all along. The others merely looked confused and interested and perhaps a little sore that the others could do something that they could not (though this was mainly in Hermione's case).

"But I… I think I can see it better than the rest of you. Or like, I can understand it better. That's why I'm drawn to it so much. Why I stare so much." A faint blush rose on his cheeks at this last admission but Ginny simply took it in her stride. "It's so old, you see. It understands everything because it was here before everything, if that makes any sense. It has seen the world grow and will see the world grow forever more and it knows better than anyone else what it good and what is evil. It's entirely incorruptible. It would never aid an evil being, and it would never kill an innocent. A complete innocent, that is. Most people have good and bad in them, right? So it would kill the bad and leave the good. If there was enough good, the person would survive.

"But it's all about the person's intentions, see? Those Death-Eaters-in-training at Hogwarts, they were killed because at that moment they intended to hurt us, to capture us, with full knowledge that we would probably be killed. They made that choice, the choice to aid evil so the Thunderbird judged them and killed them. That's what it does. It judges people. Judges them by these old, primal, black and white rules and then, if need be, carries out the sentence.

"And that's how we're going to kill Voldemort. Ginny is going to judge him and she is going to kill him. Or, she is going to kill the Voldemort parts of him anyway. That's where it gets a little complicated. He made his first body with my blood, you see, and his second with both mine and Ginny's. The souls are both his, of course, which will provide enough of himself for Ginny's power to work on him but he also has quite a lot of me and Ginny in him, so he'll only be severely weakened, not dead. That's where I, and the prophecy, come in."

The clearing was turned into a localized storm. Thunder crashed louder than anything any of the watchers dotted around the graveyard had ever heard before and lightning flashed with such frequency that it was difficult to see anything that was happening. In the center of it all stood seven figures crouched beneath a glowing white shield staring in awe at the scene before them. Because from where they were, they had a perfect view of the fight.

It wasn't a fight. Those were the words they would all repeat later on. And it was true, it wasn't. It was a bloodbath. The first wave of power from Ginny knocked the front two rows to the ground, dead in an instant. Both Voldemorts collapsed, writhing on the ground in agony but Ginny ignored them entirely. Lightning was frying Death Eaters everywhere they looked, rain was pelting down on them so hard that it drove them to the ground and Ginny was amongst them, her claws fully extended, her neck and chest covered in razor sharp feathers. Her talons flashed through the Death Eaters like they were butter and not a one of them had a chance against her. The watchers in the distance were lucky they couldn't see much more than flashes of a bright red figure darting around the clearing, leaving a trail of blood behind her. Up close the scene was disgusting.

There were almost three hundred Death Eaters when she started. When she had finished, there wasn't a single man or woman left alive. She stood, panting, as the storm died down until the evening sky was clear once more. It hadn't taken more than half an hour. Harry stepped forward and opened his mouth to call out to Ginny, to congratulate her. And then she collapsed.

Her knees buckled out from under her and then she fell, face forward, into the mound of blood and limbs and gore that spattered the ground beneath her.

"Ginny!" Harry called in shock, his eyes wide and his breathing shallow. He could hear his heart beating through his body, drowning the sound of someone calling his name behind him. He ran forward, tripping a few times in the mess until he found her. She looked so pale on the ground, covered in gore, so young. Tiny dots of blood speckled her neck and shoulders in an oddly even pattern, which a voice in the back of Harry's shell-shocked mind told him was because of the feathers.

"Ginny," he said again, kneeling in front of her and turning her over. She wasn't breathing, not that he could tell, but his sight was so blurred with unshed tears that he wasn't sure if that meant anything. He leant down to put his ear to her chest. He waited a minute. And then two. And then, through the sound of his own heart still thumping louder than possible, he thought he heard it. A beat, then another, then another. She was alive.

"Harry!" Pansy's yell finally managed to permeate his brain and he stood, turned, left his friend on the ground where she had fallen and walked slowly back to where the two Voldemorts lay. They raised their eyes as he approached, looking up in confusion.

"It's all about prophecy, you see," Harry said absently as he knelt between the two. "It's not really personal," he added as he calmly placed a hand over the Voldemort to his left's mouth, using the other one to cut off the flow of air through his nose. The Voldemort to his right began to struggle away from him, but the going was slow and rather pointless. When Harry turned to him, he was only a few feet away.

"Typical," Harry said, placing his hands over the mouth and nose, "You didn't even try to save him. You know what, I lied before. This is personal."

By the time the watchers around the graveyard came to realize that the battle was over, Harry had collapsed as well.

"…horcuxes?"

"…destroyed when Ginny…"

"That's why he collapsed… recover?"

Pansy wasn't listening. She didn't care about horcruxes or what Dumbledore's portrait had told them. She didn't care about Orders of Merlin or whether or not Harry bloody Potter was going to recover from his traumatic smothering experience. She didn't even much care anymore that every Death Eater had been accounted for or that Draco Malfoy had been released from custody on the grounds of lack of evidence.

All she cared about was Ginny. She wasn't sure that the Weasley family approved of her, as this was the first time she had been let in to see their youngest daughter. Though Ron seemed to be coming around, given that he had supported her when she told them that she could help. But no, evidently the Weasley matriarch would prefer to allow her youngest child to linger in a coma for weeks rather than let 'that horrible tacky girl who put those ideas in my daughter's head' try to help.

But she was in now. Ignoring the chatter of the other occupants of the room, she leant over Ginny. The girl looked like she could be sleeping, if it weren't for the unnatural stillness and shallowness of her breathing. She was wearing a hospital gown and her hair had been brushed out smooth over her pillow and Pansy hated that. She didn't look like Ginny without her raggedy old band t-shirts and tangled curls.

Quickly, before anybody could try and stop her, Pansy took out her wand and pressed it to Ginny's temple.

"Legilimens." Just like that, Pansy was falling through a storm. She hit the ground with a thud and saw that she was on a hill. Ginny stood next to her, her eyes fixed on the sky with a sad smile on her lips.

"It's time to go," Pansy told her, standing up. Ginny sighed. She took one last, longing look at the storm crashing around them, drenching them to the bones and she took Pansy's outstretched hand.

Because she was family. And family always came first.