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Farewell
Rest in Pieces
Master had not come home. He had gone to the ministry to retrieve the locket from that filth who took it from its righteous owners.
And he never came home. He was Merlin knows where with the blood-traitor and the mudblood. Kreacher didn't know what to do. Master had promised to destroy the locket, to fulfil Regulus' last request.
Then he read the Prophet. Late Master Orion read it every day, and nobody bothered to annul the subscription, so he still received the paper daily.
Harry Potter had freed mudbloods and escaped the ministry. Kreacher was impressed. He as good as declared war against the new regime and its policies. It had been a long time since a Head of the family had done this, lest with such panache.
He would help his master in this endeavour. He had no way to contact him. It didn't mean that he couldn't contribute.
/
Kreacher had never felt so good before. Hunting and planning the demise of his master's enemies was refreshing. It felt reenergised, and his life had meaning again. He knew a lot of his master's enemies, and that knowledge was put to good use. Some of his former masters had visited many of their dwellings in their time, so he could pop there without too much difficulty.
Kreacher had served the House of Black for seventy-four years already, and during that time, he heard many things. How his masters thought and how to crush opponents, for example. He also knew where they stashed their blackmail folders, and all the information they had on rivals. Take out the most powerful first, and the other will fall like lambs circled by wolves. Pitch them against each other. Make them angry so they make mistakes, paralyse them with fear while you move in the shadows, show them who's in control.
It was a fine line to toe. A fine line that centuries of Blacks knew how to work, until the last two generations. Kreacher roughly knew were they went wrong: a Black bowed to no one.
Harry Potter bowed to no one. Not the minister, and certainly not Voldemort. Kreacher was proud to serve such a strong master.
Hunting and planning had been hard, but he managed it.
His first foray into enemy crushing had been successful, all things considered.
/
When Severus Rogue entered the Malfoy manor in the wee hour of November first 1997, he couldn't believe his eyes.
He didn't really pay attention to the red puddles in the alleyway, and the peacocks' white feathers stuck in hedges. It wasn't so uncommon to see blood around here, sometimes his fellow Death Eaters liked to have natural light when they tortured their toys. Bellatrix had weird cravings, after all. The next rain would wash away the stains on the stones, or the elves would take care of them soon enough.
The doors were slightly ajar, which made him tense. But maybe it was a way to show him that he should have showed up earlier, or the last one hadn't bothered closing them.
One move of his hands, and the doors opened completely. Severus eyes widened for a second, until he regained control. Fear gripped his stomach. Voldemort had definitely tipped over.
Bodies littered the floor, in pools of blood, gore, and debris. Everything was wrecked, from the chandelier to the precious centuries' old artefacts on display around the entrance hall. One wall, the one between the entrance hall and the ballroom was no more. Portrait were reduced to dust, tables scattered in splinters, some imbedded on the bodies haphazardly littering the broken floor.
Severus covered his shoes with conjured plastic bags to not stain them, and cautiously walked inside. The ballroom was in the same state, with half the windows missing. There was a hole in the ground, a corpse half dangling on its edge. In one swipe of his eyes, Snape could identify more than forty dark curses and their ugly shapes on the dead men and women, all dressed for a formal ball.
He estimated the toll at about a hundred people. He knew it wasn't a lucky hit from the Order, because they never attacked, and would have never assaulted Voldemort's very own bastion. The wards hadn't been breached, and more importantly, the air reeked of Dark Magic. The Order never used Dark Magic, they were too chivalrous for that. No, this was a massacre. His first assumption that his Lord and Master had killed them all in a fit of rage was a bit off. It looked like they attacked each other, while simultaneously trying to destroy everything else. It was a wonder that the building hadn't collapsed, or that none of them used Fiendfyre otherwise he would have come to see not even a pile of ashes, and half the county would already be consumed by the cursed fire.
Still, the walls were barely holding up, chunks randomly missing or withering under nasty curses. The stench was atrocious. Snape moved his wand and the bubble head charm made it breathable again. He estimated that the guests were recently dead, between twelve to six hours. As they were all dressed for the traditional Halloween Ball at Malfoy manor, it reduced the window between eight p.m. and two a.m.
He kept exploring the building. Most of the bodies were in the ballroom and entrance hall, but he saw some in the corridors.
He tried to count them, but it was hard, due to the body parts that had flown all around, and some corpses seemed to have exploded, making it hard to identify what went with what, or even if that puddle was a full mashed person or just parts of it. Also, was that paw this guy's transfigured missing arm, or that transfigured chair's leg, or even a chunk of a conjured dog?
The only thing he was sure about, was that everything was dead. He didn't know if people had the opportunity to escape, but those who stayed on site were absolutely unalive.
Except one. He found him in the middle of the first-floor corridor, alone. He was walking slowly, wand ready, because the air was saturated with magic, and the second floor was completely gone, a sure sign that something terrible had happened there.
He had barely rounded the corner, that visions of nightmares overwhelmed him. It was only his sharp reflexes, honed by two wars and years of being a spy, that saved him.
He jumped back, running out of the manor. Hopefully, the dark creatures didn't follow him.
He took a minute to breath, and reorder his mind. Boggart. The thing was suspiciously like a boggart, if a boggart had been powered up and put on steroids. He took the time to amp his occlumency shields, making them impenetrable. In his ten seconds foray into that corridor, he saw Voldemort, on the floor. He was quite sure he was breathing, if barely. He had to go back, to verify. He couldn't pass the opportunity.
He recovered some lead from a bottomless pocket in his robes, and carefully covered his head with it. The muggles weren't so far away with their aluminium helmets to keep away intruders from entering their thoughts, they just had the wrong metal. Lead was magic resistant, but it was also a poison so it couldn't be used for too long nor too often.
Valiantly, he walked back to the mass grave. He couldn't even reapply the bubble head charm, as it couldn't take due to the lead fully encircling his head, jaw included, with only enough tiny holes to breath and see.
He wasn't going to take a chance and be defeated by whatever made every guests and Voldemort himself lose all self-control. It wasn't airborne or he would already have fallen.
Approaching his master's lying form, Snape internally sighted. It seemed to work, if barely. He had just enough wit left to him to quickly retrieve the Dark Lord and turn around. For the second time that day, he ran.
Severus Snape didn't run, and never with someone in his arms. So, his mad race didn't last long. His own heart beating furiously in his chest, he took his burden's vitals. Voldemort was sadly alive, if magically and physically exhausted.
Severus didn't know why or how, even if he had some hints to form an educated guess, but he didn't waste time in conjectures. From another bottomless pocket, he took a vial of draught of the Living Death and force fed it to the wizard at his feet. He then apparated to Hogwarts limits and went straight to his quarters. He stashed the potioned bane of his existence in a hidden nook, and summoned the Carrows.
As soon as those two assholes came to his office, he stunned them and gave them draught of the Living Death. No need to keep them around if Voldemort was neutralized. Most of his Death Eaters, all the influential ones anyway, had been at Malfoy Manor and were dead now without doubt. He could stop the charade.
He then summoned the rest of the staff.
Seeing their closed faces and hateful faces, he smiled. It was weird, as if he lost the ability to smile two decades ago. It wasn't so far from the truth, he acknowledged in the far back of his head.
He tried to open his mouth, and stopped. He still had that stupid lead ball around his head.
He carefully took it off, layer after layer, under the puzzled watch of his staff.
Too bad they didn't see him smile before, as they would have been baffled.
"The war is over. The Dark Lord is… incapacitated. As are those too." He stated, vaguely his hand towards his two former professors.
"It is maybe better that I show you." He added when no one reacted, too stunned by his bold proclamation.
He put his memory of Malfoy Manor at dawn and his following actions until he apparated back to the school wards in the pensieve.
Twenty minutes later, his colleagues came back to the present. Some threw up one the spot, some were frozen, and others like McGonagall and Flitwick immediately spoke.
"Where is he?" The little man asked.
"What did you do?" The transfiguration mistress accused.
"I wasn't responsible for whatever happened there, just the first witness of the aftermath it seems. He is in a secure location, until I can find Potter so he can fulfil the prophecy." Severus told them with a sneer. Flitwick's reaction was more on point than the stupid assumption of the old woman. Could he be the one to make more than two hundred people kill each other? If he had this power, he would have done it a long time ago.
"Potter? Prophecy?" Flitwick spoke before McGonagall could, or any of the other who seemed to be able to regain the faculty to connect their two braincells.
"Potter and Voldemort are the subject of a prophecy. I don't know the complete wording, but I know that without Potter, he cannot be truly vanquished." He explained. It pained him to do so, but he didn't see any other way. Contacting Potter on his own was unrealistic, as he didn't know and had no way of knowing where he was. Even then, the teenager would never trust him, as he should, because he had never given him even the slightest of reasons to. Therefore, the best course of action was to lead others to help Potter, as Voldemort was no threat anymore.
"How do you plan to contact Potter? What do you want to do with him?" McGonagall began.
The torrent of questions, suspicions and outright threats didn't stop after that. The hated headmaster sighted. He hostility was warranted, truly. He wasn't a good man, and played his role too well. He treated children badly even when he hadn't been forced too, and Potter much worse. He let Death Eaters teach at the school, turn student against student, allow torture as a daily occurrence, and done his fare share of unspeakable acts before becoming a spy for Dumbledore. And even that hadn't been a noble gesture, but the result of some unhealthy obsession.
Severus knew he wasn't a model of virtue. He would see the end of Voldemort because he killed Lily, nothing less, nothing more. Maybe now, he could avoid to set her son to die too, in her memory.
"I could tell you…" He cut the angry woman, but she didn't stop. One wave of his wand and she was silent.
"I could talk to you endlessly, and you would rightly not believe me. Instead, I will show you, again."
He calmly selected the new memories he wanted to share. He had to show enough that they would trust him, but not too much as they understood all the reasons why Potter was needed. Maybe Filius could handle the knowledge about Horcruxes, but he wouldn't give it to any others. He was a duellist, and half Goblin. He understood wars and its costs. He fooled everyone with his cheerful disposition, but Snape knew it was a mask, a very carefully constructed mask to make himself a smaller target. The tiny professor was much better at hiding his true nature than himself for sure.
His own reputation was of no concern. He had no qualm dying the villain, as long as his mission was completed. He certainly never wanted to become the hero (he shredded this illusion almost twenty years ago.)
His memory gathering done, he gestured to his colleagues to go into the pensieve.
He knocked out Filch, Trelawney and Hagrid, though, before they could move. Those three were unreliable, useless, and security threats. They would spill anything they learned for the flimsiest of reasons.
Sitting behind his desk, he could almost here some of what was said in the memories.
"You'll have to kill me." Echoed in his mind, followed by the man's last words. "Please, Severus, Please."
"Remember Severus, you'll have to tell Harry, but no one else can know. It is of the utmost importance. Not up until the end, and only Harry." This one was on one of the many times Dumbledore's urged him to follow with his plans. Severus always hated the old codger's plans, mostly because he always expected someone to sacrifice itself for the greater good, and this one wasn't different. He had to murder the only one who never turned his back on him, and try to bring another one (who he sworn to protect) to his demise. If he wasn't damned, he didn't know what it was.
But with the massacre at the manor, he could see another way. For that, he had to find Potter and tell him everything. He had too. If he had to break some of the oh-so-loved secrecy prone by a dead Dumbledore to do so, he would in a heartbeat. He was doing it, actually, the very same day he found and bound an unconscious Voldemort.
/
Now that the end was near, Snape was getting impatient. It had been three days. Three days since he stashed the Dark Lords in a moldy corner of the headmaster's quarters. Three days since he painfully managed to convince his colleagues that it was in everyone's best interests that Potter be located.
Three days, and nothing else of importance had happened. The demise of Voldemort and his regime had been hushed, the Ministry still investigating the tragedy at the Malfoy manor. They didn't make much progress, but to identify the victims and puzzle back the dismembered bodies back, as much as this was possible. Snape sneered at the term victim. Reading the list of names, he knew that there were no victims amongst them. They all were marked Death Eaters, their spouses, or eager participants of the reign of terror instated by Voldemort. All well aware of what was happening, revelling in the regime, or using it for their own ends. He had no pity for them. Whoever was responsible for their demise, did a great service to the future of the country.
He knew, he'd been one of them. Two hundred and seventy-five. Sure, there were more people out there who didn't mind crushing others for their own agenda, and were actively doing it, but those were amongst the worst, and the most influential.
For all they were investigating, the Ministry had no clue how this happened. Severus gave them his memory of what he saw, but it didn't help.
They were ordering him to give them Voldemort. As if he would do this. Only Potter would see him, and decide what to do. And as Hogwarts was a sovereign territory, they had no real authority over him.
If only Potter could move his ass and come already.
/
Kreacher was in a bit of a quandary. He was immensely satisfied that his plans bore fruit. But what to do with the 2073 boggarts he released and later recaptured at Malfoy Manor? They were taking a lot of space at the ancestral home of the Black, even if they were individually stashed in specially crafted shoe boxes.
Then he shrugged. They worked once, maybe they would work again? Why search further when he had a perfectly fine method to crush enemies? This was untraceable even, as long as he recaptured them before the authorities showed up, and even then, boggarts were not illegal and couldn't tell he was the one to put them there.
They weren't much of a menace individually, but released all at once on unsuspecting guests? Deadly.
Some crumbled manor in Wiltshire was an undeniable proof. Even Voldemort exhausted himself trying to kill them. Too bad boggarts were immune to the killing curse. Their only weakness was the Riddikulus, and he never thought of casting it, assailed by more than 200 hundred of them at the same time. Losing his wits when face with his worst fears, 200 times at once, would have made anyone lose his mind.
2073 shoe boxes were stacked in the attic, waiting for an opportunity to be used again.
/
The day after Christmas, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger finally showed up at Hogwarts. It had taken them almost two months and an attack by a snake hidden in some old woman's body to realise that they were on the run for nothing. Just before they left Bathilda Bagshot's house, a decapitated Nagini on the floor, Hermione scooped a pile of unread newspapers in the entrance.
"It's not like she'll need them." Hermione justified herself when Harry stared at her. "Besides, maybe we can find something interesting in them."
She was right. The whole Malfoy massacre, and some other weird occurrences when marked Death Eater and active bigots died in their homes from what was dubbed the Voldemort's madness filled pages and pages. Also, every edition since asked Harry Potter to come meet Severus Snape at Hogwarts, so he could "finally fulfil this f****ing prophecy" as the last one quoted.
/
In the end, they revived Tom Riddle, interrogated him with veritaserum before he regained enough wit to think, locked him a room with every boggart Kreacher had on hand, and dosed him with the draught again when he was sufficiently magically (and psychologically) exhausted.
The boggarts weren't really necessary, but Snape was very vindictive, and Harry didn't think it mattered much. When they stored the horcruxes with some boggarts, they realised that the cursed objects were very susceptible to them, so much that trying to defend themselves brought them to magical exhaustion which led to their destruction. Harry was glad he didn't need to break into Gringotts, but only had to store fifty innocent looking shoeboxes in Lestrange's vault. Draco Malfoy had been more than happy to do this small favour for Harry, as the new owner of the Lestrange fortune.
Even after years of research, and total annihilation of his horcruxes, they didn't find any other way to get the hitchhiker out of Harry, so ended up covering his entire body with lead, but a little surface exactly following the shape of the lightning bolt scar on his forehead. Harry spend two terrifying days alone locked in a room with the entirety of the boggarts Kreacher stocked at Grimmauld Place. The leech gave it all he had, but died on his own eventually.
Then, he just had to give Voldemort to a herd of dementors, and the deal was sealed. His body was cremated and the ashes spread in the ocean.
Further experimentation showed that when locked together, a dementor and a boggart ended up killing each other.
Which was very fortunate, as too many dementors roamed the country and they had an expert at capturing and breeding boggarts. Kreacher has his work cut out for years. He, of course, kept about a hundred in a secret location for House Black, just in case.