James is still indecisive right up until the portkey is supposed to take them away but Remus swore up and down that he was feeling better. It's been a week now and the symptoms are gone (Remus now three centimetres taller) but James is worried something will happen and he won't be there.

"We'll send you a patronus if Moony comes out suddenly," Sirius soothes, all four of them standing at the ward line in the Forbidden Forest.

"I'm just going to nap a lot," Remus says, still holding James' hand from the walk over.

"It's going in two minutes," Harry warns and then pauses. "If you want to stay then I can go by myself."

"No, no, I'm coming," James says quickly. "I just…tell me if anything happens, okay?"

"I promise."

"We promise."

James huffs and lets go of Remus' hand, stepping past the line to where Harry stands. "Bye, guys, make mischief for me."

"Always," Sirius laughs. "You get into as much trouble as you can too, yeah?"

James cries out in pain as the sword stabs forward, clamping it to his ribs with his arm. He drops his own sword with a ragged gasp and the metal clangs against the marble of the raised dais. James slowly looks down at his own torso, hands shaking.

Tom rips the sword back out and James takes a staggered step forward from the momentum before collapsing to his knees, clutching his chest.

James looks up at Tom, but his shock just turns to sadness. "I loved you."

Tom sneers, expression merciless as he raises his sword. "You've always been a fool."

The sword sings through the air and James tumbles down the steps, sprawling across the floor and lying still in a pool of robes.

Tom sheaths his sword and turns, dropping to a knee with his head bowed. "It has been done."

Sitting on the throne is Harry, legs crossed at the knee and draped in shadowy robes. "You have performed admirably for your king," Harry announces, a hissing undertone to his words.

"What are you doing?" Voldemort asks, standing in the doorway and holding a cup of tea.

Tom lurches up to his feet in panic, quickly smoothing out his clothes from the tussle beforehand, while Harry scrambles off the throne and pretends to occupy himself with fixing his glasses.

"I'm dead," James says happily from the floor.

"Yes, I can see that," Voldemort muses.

"I lost rock paper scissors for the throne," Tom explains because he feels like he needs to explain himself. This is so embarrassing, he can't believe he let James talk him into this.

Harry clears his throat awkwardly and pats a bit at the black robes they transfigured. "Sorry, um, about the swords. Tom says he can put the curses back on if you wanted?"

The two swords used to hang in the hallway, smothered in curses before James wanted to play with them. They spent the last three hours (split by a lunch) deconstructing the curses because James lured in Tom by promising he could teach swordplay that James had learned from Pureblood tutors.

"The swords were display pieces," Voldemort dismisses, walking into the room and stopping beside a still dead James. "I missed the dramatic betrayal, go back and do it again."

"It wasn't a betrayal," Tom corrects.

"Yes it was!" James complains, rolling up to his feet and turning to Voldemort. "Okay, so Tom and I are knights who were friends-"

"You decided we were friends, I had no say in that," Tom corrects.

"-but then Harry the Lich King comes in and promises Tom power-"

"Harry tried to threaten my family at first," Tom says to Voldemort like they're sharing a joke.

"Don't know why I bothered," Harry grumbles.

"-so Tom and I just had our first fight after he turned to the Dark side," James continues. "I was hoping he'd keep me alive so we could do a fun prison break thing but nah, he just went straight for it."

"I was pretending to be subservient," Tom adds on. "I would have stabbed Harry as soon as he turned his back."

"I was actually going to off you just then," Harry admits. "You've gotten too powerful, so I was going to kill you now that you've taken care of James."

James blinks. He just wanted to swordfight, but these boys are out here playing politics.

Voldemort raises an eyebrow. "Well then, since I've ruined the current plot." He raises a hand over James' head and light condenses, forming a tight suit of white scaled armour around James as a sword wreathed in white fire forms in his hand. "Go, my holy knight, defeat the accursed scourge encroaching upon the lands."

James takes the sword into two hands and settles into a dramatic stance. "For the Gods!"

Tom draws his sword with a loud shhhiiiing and their swords clash against each other. James was going easy since Tom is still learning but now he's all out with twisting parries that knock Tom's sword back and leave him open to blows with the flat of James' sword (because they spelled on body armour but James still doesn't want to stab anyone).

"Knock his glasses off!" Harry calls out when the two are locked blade against blade.

James jerks back but Tom makes a grab and the glasses are thrown off, skittering across the ground.

"Wait, wait, time out!" James cries. He can see the sword of course, but it's blurry and Tom keeps twisting it at the last second, digging in at strange angles, and James can't see Tom's line of sight or the way his body shifts a small bit in preparation for attacks.

"What a useless knight," Voldemort tsks and summons James' glasses back.

There's so much interference that it ends with James and Tom sitting off to the side as Harry and Voldemort sling spells at each other across the room.

.

A/N: Voldemort likes playing god and Tom isn't playing like a child, he's brushing up on his missed Pureblood tutoring, shut up Harry-