Title: Matter of Perspective

Card Name: Bonfire

Square #: O

Square #: 1

Link:

Line Y/N?: (Down, Across, Diagonal) N

Blackout Y/N? N

Your team: Team Vampire

Prompt: Light!Tom Riddle O-1

Summary: In a world where Tom Riddle wasn't the bad guy, he and his knights seek to end the tyrannical reign of Albus Dumbledore

Beta Love: Dragon and the Furry Barnacle, Dutchgirl01 the Perpetually Busy, Flyby Commander Shepard the Budgie Trainer in Chief


Snape crumpled to the floor as Rodolphus and Rabastan heaved him back up and tried to help him to stand, but blood was streaming from various places—cutting hexes and more evidenced in patchwork over his skin.

A bare foot settled next his head, and Voldemort scowled down at him before he snapped, "What happened?"

"The Weasleys, my Lord," the Lestrange brothers said together.

Voldemort waved his wand, and he levitated Snape over to a settee which he transformed into a more comfortable bed. "Damn those bloody weasels," he cursed. "Albus' oh so loyal, brainless knights. Fanatical but stupid. Devoted and oblivious."

"Fortunately still oblivious to our true intentions," Severus rasped with a cough. He grimaced with a hint of fang, his face twisting as he reached into his robes to pull out a black swath of cloth.

The cloth unfurled in an unwrapping of teeth as the babyfold relinquished its prize: a diadem.

"She found it," Voldemort whispered, staggering slightly as he sat down with the revelation.

"My mate is not an imbecile," Severus said. "Getting it to me proved—difficult. The youngest Weasley wanted his pound of flesh, and Longbottom used some sort of vampiric tentacula on me so Weasley could use his mum's cutting hexes on me. I'm not quite sure how they saw me. I suspect Longbottom's plants were there lying in wait. I was caught by them as I attempted to leave the grounds. The tentacula, however, released me when it didn't like my flavour."

"Irony there," Rabastan said, smirking. "Your mate always says you have the best blood."

"She's biassed," Severus muttered. "She's my mate. She's supposed to like my blood."

"Potato, po-tah-toe," Rudolphus muttered. "Here, your mate told me to throw this at your head if you ever started bleeding out more than you took in." He threw a large fruit the size of a grapefruit at him.

Severus mumbled something in ancient Latin as his fangs sank in, and the fruit turned to dust as all the juice swiftly disappeared. The many wounds that had been oozing blood over his body knit together and stopped bleeding everywhere.

Voldemort used a spell to lift the diadem into the air and shook it a few times to get the clingy babyfold to let go. The babyfold hissed as its prize escaped.

Rabastan shooed the babyfold over to Severus, and the babyfold seemed to sulk into Snape's hair like a child being told to go to their room.

Severus rolled his eyes. "I have no idea how my mate wrangles so many of them at once."

Rabastan shrugged. "She snuggles with Dementors in the library. I doubt she's going to let a small horde of babyfolds get the best of her."

"We have them all," Voldemort said. He placed the diadem into the ritual circle. "Finally, Albus' nefarious web of lies will be exposed, and the magic he has used to reshape our world will be freed."

There was a moaning, and they all turned to see Fenrir Greyback cradling a limp child in his arms. "Another one," he growled. "Cursed like all the others. I had to override it with my bite to stop it from destroying them."

Voldemort curled his lip. "I hope with the destruction of his Horcruxes that this crime against magic and children ends. It is one thing to fight adults—"

"What does this warping of our world even gain him?" Fenrir growled. "A world where cursing children makes lycanthropy the only solution? I want a safe place for my wolves, not a refugee camp. It's bad enough that Lyall painted me as a monstrous villain, saying I cursed his boy to get back at him when in fact I actually saved his damn life from Albus' curse!"

Voldemort touched the runes around the magical circle. "I think he's trying to craft a world where he is the Master of Death," he said after a while. "Where he is the hero, the victor, the master god of Olympus where mortals kiss his feet. I've looked into a few crystal balls. Most were utterly useless. But a few—showed me other worlds like ours but different. Worlds where we were the destructors, the desecrators, and the murderers. Rapists. Defilers of children."

"He wants to mould the world into his perfect image," Severus said grimly, his wounds healed after a series of devoured, desiccated fruit. "Many of the old master vampires wanted much the same, and their megalomania did not end well for them. Nor does it for most mortals who get too big for their trousers."

"And what keeps him from calling on his Hallows and obliterating us the moment he realises his Horcruxes have been destroyed?" Rabastan asked. "Like he destroyed Bella—made her so insane that she went on a rampage in the Muggle city and was taken out with their weapons—their science.?"

"Me," said a weakened voice.

They turned and saw Hermione take a few shuffling steps before collapsing. Her attending Lethifolds swirled around her, holding her in a sling of their bodies, the babyfolds squeaking in distress as they tugged at her, trying to get her standing again. Her body was covered with the familiar crisscrossed slashes of Longbottom's mutant Tentacula.

She slowly stood as Severus attended her, slid a claw over his neck with a hiss, and drew her mouth to it.

"What have you done, Lady Hermione?" Voldemort asked, his eyebrows furrowed with concern.

After Hermione fed for a few minutes, she pulled away from her mate's alluring neck and smiled at him. She turned to Voldemort and pulled her main Lethifold seemingly out of thin air.

"Walter ate his Cloak of Invisibility. Ron nicked it and used it to sneak into the dormitories to rut with his girlfriend. He forgot about the enchanted stairs, went tumbling down them and knocked himself out, lost the cloak, and—" Hermione chuckled. "Walter ate it."

Walter gave off a soft burp, and he went semi-transparent.

Severus gave her a constipated look at the mention of Ronald Weasley, and Rabastan chuckled into his hand, as Voldemort just snorted.

"Weasels," Voldemort said in disgust. "Best and worst allies Albus has."

"On the bright side, he broke his cock on the way down, and it hurt like hell, poor puppy," Hermione noted with amusement.

The males winced, obviously in instinctual sympathy.

"Serves him right for using Engorgio on his bits," Hermione said. "Should I detail the part where he knocked down a suit of armour on the way down and ended up chopping off his—"

"NO!" the wizards all yelled together.

Hermione smirked as Voldemort and the rest of his knights grimaced in phantom pain.

"Well, without the cloak and the ring, he only has the Elder wand," Voldemort said. "While not insignificant, he will be unable to enslave Death and be immortal. Perhaps, Death will pay him a visit for his—hospitality."

Voldemort sighed. "Help me summon the Fiendfyre," he said. "We need to make sure they all burn."

"For magic," Voldemort said, sending flames into the circle.

"For Bella," Rabastan and Rodolphus said together as they sent fire into the circle.

"For the children," Fenrir said as he sent his fire in with the others.

"For the Old Ways," Lucius said.

"For the innocent," Hermione added.

"For the forgotten," Severus intoned.

One by one, each of Voldemort's knights added more fire to the circle until it was a blaze of brightness. The artefacts screamed as a cloud of blackness rose up from the fire like an erupting volcano, but the clouds were devoured by the fire as well until only the bright fire remained.

Until even that faded away.

"It's been an honour," Voldemort said as he turned to his knights.

They bowed to him silently as Tom Riddle's lips tugged into a sad smile. "I'm free, at last. Be good to each other."

His body turned grey and then floated away as countless motes of ash.

Hermione pressed her face into Severus' chest as the other knights closed their eyes, each of them silently congratulating each other and mourning all they had lost.


Albus woke in a dead sweat, his body trembling, his eyes wide.

Something was wrong.

Something wasn't right.

The room was cold.

Too cold.

Too dark.

He sat up straight, his eyes straining to see.

A small, dim green glow formed in his vision.

"Hello, Albus," a deep voice said, seemingly coming from all around him. "I hear you wish to become the master of me." A Dark chuckle vibrated around him as if the walls were shaking.

"I've brought a few friends who have a bone to pick with you," Death said as his body materialised in the gloom.

A skeleton formed with so many bones, human and decidedly not.

Death chuckled deeply again, an eerie glowing from his eye sockets like fire in the hearth. "But there is one who deserves the first kick, as it were."

Dumbledore's eyes widened as the ghostly form of Ariana formed into flesh, her eyes glowing with the light of the grave. She hadn't aged a day from the moment she had died—

Behind here were others.

Grindelwald.

A crowd of cursed children that had once caught on to his true intentions—children he had arranged to "disappear."

The Prewett twins who had dared to defy their sister's blind devotion to him—

So many more.

Ariana seized him by the shoulders as her body grew incredibly hot—as hot with magic the day she had accidentally killed their mum.

Albus screamed in terror as the seething horde of angry spirits descended upon him seeking vengeance or justice—it was hard to tell between the ensuing shrieks of agony.

When the screams stopped, the foundations of Hogwarts shuddered as the now-free leylines zipped about in celebration and left their prison, re-energising the surrounding land as they went, bringing magic back to the whole of Scotland.


Rita Skeeter Publishes Book:

The Truth of Secret Tyrant Albus Dumbledore In His Own Words

Rita Skeeter claims the spirit of Albus Dumbledore came to her to confess his crimes in order for his soul to move on. Her newest book, supposedly penned from the man's own confessions, is filled with supposed facts that caused Molly Weasley to Obliviate herself into a drooling, babbling permanent in-patient at St Mungos. The entire Wizarding World was rocked when Dumbledore's desiccated, frozen-in-a-scream corpse was found in his office at Hogwarts, and many believe that Rita Skeeter made it all up.

Skeeter, however, claims, "I couldn't even make this shite up."


Severus scowled at the sight of his mate covered in a mass of cooing babyfolds. He shooed them away as he lay down beside her, deep within the heart of the Undead Nation. He took her into his embrace and held her tight.

"Feeling cuddly tonight?" Hermione murmured sleepily as she snuggled into him.

"For you?" Severus answered. "Always."

Hermione chuckled. "It's good to be home. I've had quite enough of being a teenager."

"I'm quite through with teenagers myself," Severus said, stroking her hair with his talons.

"Good thing our children are all grown," Hermione chuckled. "Many times over."

Severus chuckled. "That and our fertility seems to cycle in hundreds of years instead of how mortals measure it—not that—" He purred and latched onto her neck and sucked. "We can't make sure our skills aren't perfectly honed in the meantime.

Hermione meeped as her mate plastered her into the silken sheets and demonstrated that his prowess in bed hadn't completely disappeared after their forced parting. Her pleasured shriek echoed down the halls as a Dementor hung a Do Not Disturb sign on their door as it floated by.


And they lived well-satisfied ever after. Heh. Heh. Heh.