Author's Note: Inspired by a throwaway gag in one of Rorschach's Blot's oneshots.

Tiberius Avery nearly wet himself as a familiar figure emerged from the shadows of Knockturn Alley.

"M-Milord!" he stammered, snapping a sharp salute. The pale, tall figure merely regarded him with contempt.

"Avery," the Dark Lord said in a musing voice. "It is too much to expect, I presume, that you have already completed the task I gave you?"

Despite himself, the Pureblood aristocrat felt a flare of irritation: he had only been given his mission three days ago. What did the Dark Lord expect? That he had a secret Time-Turner?

Still, when the Dark Lord made a slight motion with his wand, Avery straightened and plastered on his most unctuous expression. "I have not yet found my way into the Department of Law Enforcement's most closely-guarded files, milord," he said, simpering like that rat Pettigrew. "However, I am pleased to report that Alanna Meadows is gone – you may have heard already–"

"That was you?" the Dark Lord said in an uninterested voice, but Avery could detect the faint note of surprise. He swelled with pride.

"Yes, Milord, I killed the Mudblood-loving filth with my own hands," he said, his smile a bit more honest than before. "Her friend, too – I knotted their intestines together, so they might truly be bound as one." He chuckled. "I hope the miserable blood-traitor wretches in the Aurors got an eyeful."

"I am certain they did," murmured the Dark Lord. His expression was unreadable. "What else have you accomplished recently, my friend?"

Avery, always eager to sing his own praises, went down the list with great eagerness: the Muggles murdered, the Half-Bloods harassed, the blood-traitors' shops burned down…

Only when he trailed to a stop did the Stunner hit him in the back.

"From the horse's mouth," a hag said, straightening her back and shaking back the hem of her filthy hood as she inspected the unconscious Death Eater. "That should be enough to put him away for good, connections or no connections."

"I can't believe it," mused the vampire who had just been conversing with her, scratching at his face. This pale makeup always gave him a rash afterwards, to say nothing of the way these false teeth kept scraping his mouth. "He really fell for it…"

"But of course," said the Dark Lord dryly. "It's exactly what the Muggles say about telling a big enough lie – if the Dark Lord comes out of the shadows and says 'Wotcher?', it's so absurd it's got to be true, hasn't it?" He strode forward – and managed to trip over his own feet. "Bugger – excuse my language," he said, barely regaining his balance in time to avoid sprawling on top of the Death Eater. "It's this silly tall figure – keep expecting my legs to be shorter than they are. I'll get used to it soon enough, and then you'll see – be dancing across London in no time."

The "hag" and the "vampire", both of whom were all too familiar with their colleague's dubious coordination, only turned to each other and raised their eyebrows.

Harry Potter sat across the table from Voldemort and carefully watched his expressions.

"No, no," he said after a moment. "I tell you, he doesn't flare his nostrils unless he's really surprised. And you've got them too big again – they really are slits." He propped his chin up on one hand as he watched Voldemort adjust. "Okay, now twirl your wand." The Dark Lord complied. "Look, you've almost got it down. But you can't flub it at all."

"I am afraid, boy," the Dark Lord said slowly, "that it is most difficult to toy with one's wand with fingers that could readily accommodate another set of knuckles –"

"I know, but this is his signature gesture. He was playing with his wand when he was a teenager, even–"

Harry buried his face in his hands as Voldemort burst into a fit of screaming laughter. "I knew there was something wrong with how I said that," he muttered as the Dark Lord pounded his fist on the table in a most unlordly fashion. "All right, all right, I think that's as far as we can go for today. It'll be hard to get back in the mood."

"For the best," the Dark Lord said, still sniggering, as he complied. "It's hard to hold a complicated form while laughing that hard."

Harry sat back in his chair and watched as the form of his nemesis dissolved into the comparably benign form of one Nymphadora Tonks. "You know, the real problem with this form is that he's just too tall," she mused, plucking at her now-grossly-oversized robes, which draped on her like a child playing dress-up. "I've got to figure out how Animagi make their clothes change with them. I can't just run around the corner and have the Dark Lord run back with a robe far too short for him, can I?"

"I dunno, a miniskirt might look fetching on him," Harry said drolly. "Legs that go on forever, smooth, hairless alabaster skin, a certain sinuous walk…" Grinning, he ducked the Pumpkin Pasty she threw at him. "Seriously, though, I think your best bet is to just get used to transfiguring your robes on the fly."

She pouted. "Honestly, though, how did I do?"

"Getting better," he said. "Not sure if you could fool real intimates if you had to keep it up, but that just means you have to avoid that situation. Keep them talking about themselves and their plans, and feed them generalities and leading questions if they try to turn the conversation back to you."

"Mm." She raised an eyebrow. "How'd you learn to do that, anyway?"

"Bless my Divination elective," Harry said dryly. "The dear old fraud's taught me so much by example that I could go into the business myself, if I liked – shake down a few rich, gullible Purebloods for all they're worth. Pity cold-reading isn't the subject she's supposed to be teaching."

Tonks shrugged. "Hogwarts's dubious standards aside – Thanks again for your coaching, Harry. You wouldn't believe who we've brought in. Sure, they try to plead entrapment, but it doesn't quite work – after all, I never command them to commit any crimes, just ask them how their current ones are going."

"My pleasure." Harry scratched at his scar. "Might as well put this to some use."

Draco Malfoy was most frazzled.

Not only was his usual Imperius session with Rosmerta interrupted by his Lord's sudden appearance – how had he known where he was? The Dark Mark? – but he had then been subjected to a rough interrogation on his current activities at Hogwarts, which were so pitiful that he nearly wished the Dark Lord would get it over with and just cast the Killing Curse. Alas, no such luck; after a miserable hour in which he was ordered to describe his every plan in exhausted detail, the Dark Lord curtly told him to Apparate them both back to Malfoy Manor.

At that, he blinked. "But, Milord, you can do that your–"

"As I am well aware, young Malfoy," the Dark Lord said silkily, twirling his wand around his fingers. (And how did he do that? It made Draco dizzy just to watch.) "But I told you to do so."

Draco's shoulders sagged. This was just another humiliation, meant to assert dominance over a most unsatisfactory servant. Well, better this than the Cruciatus, he supposed, and complied.

The sensation of landing at Malfoy Manor would be the last he knew before darkness took him.

Tonks took one stroll around after stashing an unconscious Draco in the dungeons (alongside several pale and injured Muggle children, she found to her horror), greeting the various Azkaban escapees coolly, and made a careful note of all their positions and any changes from Dobby's comprehensive report on the place. Then she scattered a set of explosives around the joint, placed the beacon to which the Auror raid would all jump in a safe location, and went back to get the kids to safety before activating both.

She would have participated, but Amelia Bones had explicitly ordered her to keep herself out of the line of fire, her talent being far too valuable to waste. Well – maybe that, or it was her boss's way of repaying the Life Debt for finding out about the assassination plot an hour before it was set to take place. Not that Ms. Bones would ever admit it if that were the case.

The raid went off just fine without her, anyway. She would learn there was a bit of a hitch when reinforcements showed up to the party, including the real Voldemort, but Moody "ran away" just long enough to fetch his own reinforcements – namely the Order – including one Albus P.W.B. Dumbledore. The aftermath left Voldemort abandoning the field with his skin intact, along with several followers, but many more were either taken into custody or killed… the Lestranges among the latter.

Funny thing there. With the House of Lestrange extinct, some convoluted clauses in Bellatrix's marriage contract led to their vault passing to either the Black Heir or Bellatrix's oldest living relative, depending on how one interpreted the legalese, and the ambiguity was resolved when Harry signed over any rights he might have on that front to Tonks's mum. Sweet of him, really.

Tonks, being more a witch of action than a scholar, didn't quite understand what in Bellatrix's vault made her mum nearly piss herself, but whatever it was got her demanding several books from the Black library and spending the freshly-inherited money on some weird ingredients. Cor, the look on her mum's face when Harry told her he'd just give her fresh basilisk fangs, provided she'd tell him what all the fuss was about…

Anyway, the resulting hubbub led to Kreacher turning over a different but somehow related artifact, Harry getting forced at wandpoint into emergency surgery at St. Mungo's after he made one too many comments about his scar in front of Tonks's paranoid mum, and an exhaustive search of Hogwarts from top to bottom after Tonks's mum got some funny ideas about just what sort of anchor would be required to power the curse on the Defense position. The last freaked Tonks out a bit… honestly, that thingy of the Dark Lord's had been just lying around in the Room of Hidden Things? Cor, she'd used that as her go-to spot for making out with her boyfriends! Maybe that explained what sleazeballs they were…

Nah, Voldemort might have been responsible for many great evils, but even she had to admit it was too much of a stretch to blame him for her horrid taste in men. Bugger.

The war came to an unceremonious close when, over Christmas break, Voldemort and his remaining followers attacked Longbottom Manor. Augusta perished in the battle, but the old woman made them earn it; after felling several men half her age, she hurled a particularly vicious bit of magic at the Dark Lord but hit his snake instead.

Though he took her apart brutally a second later, the surviving Death Eaters would testify she died laughing.

Her laughter would prove doubly merited when her horrified grandson, splattered with the remains of the woman who, for good and for ill, had been his caretaker for almost all his life, flew into a berserker rage and repaid the Dark Lord in the same coin, then proceeded in like manner to the rest of the Death Eaters. The only survivors were those who immediately threw down their wands and groveled on the floor.

A surprising response from hardened murderers, no matter how terrible their foe, but their Dark Marks had just burned away. Only a warped, twisted patch of skin, like the scar from a splash of vile acid, remained.

The Dark Lord was dead.

Author's Note: The gag in question was a scene from Dead Sirius in which Tonks impersonates Voldemort in order to prank Draco Malfoy.

My immediate thought was "Wait, she could? Wait. She could..."

And, in a strange way, it's the safest possible disguise for infiltrating the Death Eaters. Anyone else can get questioned and potentially caught - especially since Voldemort is a Legilimens. But no one's going to question Lord Voldemort, now are they?

Omake:

Tonks lowered her copy of the Daily Prophet and shook her head wryly. It seemed that, after all the hype of Harry being the Chosen One, they just didn't know how to cope with Neville Longbottom filling the new role. (It didn't help that Neville, having no interest in being honored for a battle that had seen his last sane living relative dying horribly before his eyes, had graphically told both the press and the Ministry where they could shove all their titles and publicity.)

Yawning, she stretched and lay back in her beach chair. Bless Ms. Bones for granting her six months of paid leave upon Voldemort's second and final fall (she had the impression Ms. Bones would give everyone the same, were the Aurors not busier than ever chasing down the last of the Dark Lord's followers), and bless the head of the House of Black for funding her family vacation. Of course, it helped that he had come along; that scholarly friend of his might never forgive him for abruptly "taking a leave of absence" from school in the middle of the year, but Tonks couldn't argue with his logic that a permanent stay of execution was worth a celebration.

"Enjoying yourself?" the wizard in question asked, wandering past in his swim trunks, umbrella-sporting sugary drink in hand. (Non-alcoholic… she thought. Tropical resorts didn't check too carefully when scads of money were involved.)

"I dunno, it could be a bit livelier," she said, fanning herself. "I mean, I'm an Auror. We're not made for all this relaxation." Her parents were frolicking in the surf; it was a bit weird to see them enjoying themselves so freely for once. Perhaps the strain of knowing some Blood-Purist might go after them on a lark had weighed on them more heavily than even she'd known. "I'll get rusty."

He chuckled. "Yeah… I must admit, it is getting a bit strange." He scratched the back of his neck. "June already, and no one's tried to kill me. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop."

She looked over at him. Freedom had agreed with him well, too; he seemed to have grown a few inches, though that was more because he could bear to hold his head high than any physical increase in stature, and he'd lost that horrible gaunt look he'd gotten after Sirius's death. The sole blemish was the faint scarring across his forehead, and Merlin's beard… that was an improvement over his old scar, knowing what she now knew… "Don't bother waiting," she said, smiling. "After all, all's well that –"

Screams made her head whip around, and she beheld an immense and horrible kraken-humanoid hybrid rising from beneath the waves; panicked beach-goers stampeded across the sand, her parents among them. "Oh, bugger," she swore, rolling off her beach chair and seizing her wand. Harry had already pulled his from the waistband of his shorts and was charging towards the abomination, wand held high. "I just had to say that, didn't I?"