Author's Note: Pure silliness about the silliest potion in canon. I mean, it's liquid deus ex machina, so why not go completely overboard?

Some Dumbledore-bashing, literal Mundungus-bashing, and dead Death Eaters.

As Harry crept back into the castle, triumphantly carrying within his robes the bottle which contained Slughorn's secret memory, he mused that he probably could have gotten by with a mouthful of Felix Felicis, rather than gulping down the full vial...

Oh, well, it couldn't have hurt, could it?

At that very moment, Gringotts employees were conducting surreptitious sweeps of the higher-security vaults. In these miserable times of increased Ministry scrutiny, they could not afford undetected intruders.

And that was why Throatgrasp nearly wet himself at the faint but unmistakable signal coming from the Lestrange vault.

Try as he might, he could not force the detection spells to eliminate the 'false positive' leaking from one of the oldest vaults in Gringotts. Since the high artificers of the goblins never erred, that meant there was an intruder in there, and extreme steps had to be taken to prevent the fiend from making it out with the contents.

They were still smarting from the Vault 713 incident five years ago. If a dragon-guarded vault was pierced, their competitors would waste no time in heaping mud upon the honorable name of Gringotts. The Gnomes of Zurich had long wanted to break into the British market...

That was why a goblin task force immediately broke into the vault and extracted the offender. A goblet, to be precise.

It sounded absurd, but a break-in conducted solely with remotely-animated artifacts had been the final insult before the 1752 Rebellion. Incidentally, the rebellion hadn't quite ended until the human families directly involved were purged to the last member - not a fact mentioned in wizards' history books. The goblins still regarded as a bitter insult all of those openly-flaunted "legitimately-bought heirlooms" of goblin origin that had coincidentally first appeared in the public eye after that disastrous burglary...

On the golden side, the goblet wasn't a herald of new disasters. On the brass side, it was only an abomination before the laws of magic.

Fortunately goblins had experience destroying such objects most expeditiously. You see, when you make a career of breaking into ancient tombs of fallen sorcerer-kings...

At that very moment, Kreacher was returning to Grimmauld Place, a crazed look in his eye.

Now, surely the rotten half-blood master, greedy, grasping, unworthy little thing that it was, would not want its illegitimate inheritance taken away from it, would it? Surely the bad master, that wicked, lawless boy, had been insane, just as Kreacher's dear mistress had been in her later years? Just as even the bad master had ordered the home cleaned once he returned, overriding his mistress's orders that not a thing was to be touched, the half-blood filth would surely order the Black possessions returned - and hadn't because his inferior half-blood brain had not thought to do so?

Surely!

So, really, Kreacher was not going against orders by retrieving the locket. No, Kreacher was only being sensible... and surely the bad master, even if he woefully had the right to order Kreacher to not interfere with the disposal of Black heirlooms, had not ordered Kreacher to not interfere with the disposal of the locket... it hadn't quite been good Master Regulus's property in the first place, after all...

And the injuries inflicted to the sneak-thief had only been in self-defense. After all, Kreacher was a House-Elf, and the sneak-thief, however low and despicable, was a wizard. It had been an unfair fight, a cast-iron pan against a wand. Most unfair. Which was why Kreacher had used especial vigor.

At least the sneak-thief's depredations had done one good thing. Kreacher crept closer to a stash of particularly powerful artifacts, one his dear mistress had forbidden him to touch, but which the ravages of the Order had uncovered... which surely meant it was permitted to use them upon the locket, yes?

Within ten minutes, there was a tremendously loud bang, followed by mad laughter.

At that very moment, there was a tremendously loud bang elsewhere, but followed by hysterical sobbing.

Draco Malfoy cowered behind a stack of moldering papers as one towering heap of discarded rubbish collapsed after another. He didn't even know what he'd done! He could have sworn he just tripped and grazed a pile with his backwards-flung foot!

Evidently all the Room of Hidden Things needed to go to pieces was one small push in exactly the wrong place. Literally.

He thought he might have heard a thin, piercing human scream when one of the towers collapsed and set off a chain-reaction of detonations of antiquated, half-finished potions, but he didn't want to know. Every man for himself - that was what he had to say. Every man for himself.

Then it was his turn to scream as the cyclopean stack behind which he cowered began to topple. No! No! No! Not like this! A Malfoy could not die like this! Not buried beneath the filth of ages!

With no other recourse - he'd dropped his wand when he'd tripped, and it had rolled off into the filthiest recesses of the room of elemental hoarding - he dove for the Vanishing Cabinet. Incomplete it may have been, but it was at least a possible escape, if only he could get through in time -

His top half made it through. Then, somewhere around his buttocks, he became aware that he was stuck.

Then he screamed loudly as something very large and heavy came down upon his lower legs, and the bones snapped like badly-made broomsticks.

As his tear-filled eyes gazed upon an interrupted Death Eater meeting, he realized they might have gotten the better deal.

"What is this?" the Dark Lord hissed, turning red eyes narrowed to slits upon him. A black-robed heap - Draco thought it was Avery - got up from its place on the floor and hastily rejoined its fellows. The Dark Lord seemed not to notice or care. "What foolishness is this, Draco?"

Draco did the commonly-advised thing when the Dark Lord was angry with one and one was in a lot of pain, and settled for incoherently moaning.

"I tire of schoolboys' games," the Dark Lord snarled, pacing towards Draco. The Death Eaters nearby cleared out gracefully and speedily. Draco would hate them more for their cowardice if he didn't want so badly to join them. "I shall repair this. And we shall take Hogwarts tonight."

There was a choking noise. More than one. "But - my Lord, what of Dumbledore?" asked one figure - Selwyn, Draco thought, but it was hard to tell in the state he was in. It might have been the younger Rosier. "I thought-"

"Perhaps you should stop that, lest you hurt yourself as young Draco has," drawled the Dark Lord. "Dumbledore is old and foolish, and has fallen prey to a recent illness..." Anger flashed briefly across his face. "One I wish to determine in person when and why he contracted it. Severus's reporting is not what it once was..."

Placing one foot upon Draco's head, he leaned through the Vanishing Cabinet and muttered several long and complex incantations Draco couldn't quite make out, likely accompanied by several long and complex wand movements Draco couldn't make out because the Dark Lord's foot was on his head. Then he withdrew and nodded to the Death Eaters. "It is done." The serpentine face sneered down at Draco. "That took you the better part of the year?"

With Draco's dignity thus destroyed beyond repair... it still seemed to be adding insult indecently to injury when the Dark Lord led the Death Eaters into Hogwarts over his incapacitated body.

At that very moment, Dumbledore was pontificating to Neville Longbottom about his role in the grand scheme of things, which he must keep most secret...

What? He was supposed to only be doing that with Harry? But the Prophecy had so neatly provided 'an heir and a spare', and the difficulty with spares was that they were sometimes needed. And Albus had always benefited from cultivating spares. Why, if he hadn't been keeping up a stream of woebegotten missives to Elphias Doge while he was luxuriating in sunlit days with Gellert, where would he have been when it all came crashing down? Precisely.

So Harry thought he was the only one, and Neville thought that, no matter what others might believe about Harry, he was the only one. It worked out neatly that way.

Harry was still a comfortable distance away (the boy hadn't destroyed all the tracking devices in his temper tantrum last year) when all of Albus's alarms went off.

He sat bolt upright in his chair, blinking dumbly, and his expression must have been no more dignified than Neville's. A moment later, he recovered: intellectually, he knew the alarms must be false, because there was no way Tom could have made his way inside Hogwarts. This must have been some prank by young Draco. Very clever of him, really. More clever than his usual youthful indiscretions - Gellert had been expelled at a younger age than Draco, so what excuse did the boy really have? But that was surely a sign a spark of goodness still existed inside his soul, one yearning for redemption, else he would have been more competent...

"Excuse me, Neville," he said benignly as he rounded the desk, placing a firm hand on the boy's shoulder and shoving him down as he attempted to rise. "This is a small matter, which I will take care of shortly."

He ignored both the boy's gabbling and the hysterical Sorting Hat, which seemed to believe this was a real invasion and its services were needed. No, he would take care of this and be back before Harry returned. After all, the great Albus Dumbledore could do no el-

On his way down the staircase outside his office, he tripped over his own robes and went crashing down, unconsciousness instantly claiming him.

A bit later, Harry rounded the corner and ran straight into the point of a wand.

"Avada Kedavra," drawled an all-too-familiar voice, and he dropped like a puppet whose strings were cut.

In the next moment, he found himself staring into a blessedly familiar face. "Sirius?" he choked out, tears coming to his eyes.

"Look, Harry," his godfather said, meeting his eyes with a solemn gaze. "Love to stay and chat, but I don't think you'll be with me too long, so here's the important things about being a man that I never told you. First, if you're going to have a harem, make sure all the girls know first: it's a hassle, but it's a lot safer in the long run. Bellatrix was a lot less terrifying than Marlene McKinnon. And did you know the Abbotts have distant Veela ancestry? Anyway - Second, choose protecting your loved ones over seeking vengeance. The latter feels better at the time, but it sure as hell doesn't after a dozen years in Azkaban. Third, 'if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him'. And by 'Buddha', I mean any wise and serene old berk smirking down upon your suffering because it's essential to his grand plan for your enlightenment - got that? Good, because I sure didn't. Not in life. And fourth - Oh, damn it, you need to go back. Take care, all right? Value your life. Love you, kid."

And with that, he shoved at Harry, and Harry found himself on the floor, with a screaming Neville Longbottom vaulting over his prone body and coming down full-force on an equally-prone Voldemort.

The Sword of Gryffindor carved through both wizard and snake, and it was done. The Death Eaters gawped at Neville. Neville, as best Harry could tell with Neville's back to him, gawped back, as though he could not quite believe what he had done.

Then the corridor filled with light and heat.

As best anyone could tell afterwards, Tonks had come rushing down the corridor from the other end and, seeing herself horrifyingly outnumbered by the Death Eater horde, decided to go out with a kamikaze overpowered Blasting Curse.

At least, that had been her intention. On her way, she'd managed to trip and bang her wand hand into the wall; despite panicking and checking her wand, it seemed to be undamaged and seemed to work just fine, so she'd shaken her head and run on. In actuality, given what had happened next, it must have suffered a hairline crack, but not one severe enough to affect the functionality of the basic charms she used to test it.

An already-overpowered spell, however, was another matter.

More or less, the entire corridor exploded. Shards of her wand were found embedded between the stones of the walls. In that respect, it suffered only a little less than the Death Eaters, who were found evenly dispersed in a carbonized layer carpeting the ceiling, walls, and floor of the corridor. All the pardons in the world could not help them now.

Harry and Neville, at the very edge of the blast, were thrown free and sustained only second-degree burns and fractured bones, which were freakishly minor injuries given the circumstances. As Harry would later muse, he could easily take worse injuries from a nasty Quidditch game. Tonks herself sustained worse, but was blessedly knocked away from the worst of it by the recoil; she retained the presence of mind to morph her innards back into functioning shape, and restored her exterior to normal after a good night's rest.

The sheer amount of luck involved in trading moderate injuries to three mediocre combatants for the complete annihilation of the Dark Lord and his elites could not believed, and would fuel conspiracy theories for decades. Harry, having just died, come back to life, and suffered a concussion in the bargain, was too dazed to be properly grateful.

"Oh, bugger," he said groggily, groping in his robes and coming away with nothing but silvery liquid and shattered glass for his pains. "Trust Felix to run out now... Went to all that trouble, and that big bang goes and breaks the bloody memory-bottle..."