Ink and Parchment ~ blood and bone

55

As a matter of fact she hadn’t told Severus anything at all about her new plans yet, and she hadn’t been planning on informing him anytime soon either.

Buggering fuck.

~

“This is your plan?” Severus deadpanned, staring at her from across his desk, a mountain of essays stacked between them.

“Yep” Eliza replied, obnoxiously popping the ‘p’ just to annoy him a bit more.

“And then what? You and the dark lord corner one of the most powerful wizards of our time in a creepy cave in the middle of nowhere?”

“Yes sir” Eliza chimed in pretending to be oblivious to Severus’ tone.

“And then you just, kill him. Just like that?” he questioned incredulously and Eliza allowed herself to roll her eyes.

“Well we’re hardly leading him out there to serenade him, are we?”

Severus let out a grumpy hiss and levelled her with a disapproving look “I know for a fact it is within your capabilities to be serious and you only choose to annoy me for your sadistic amusement, but I am asking you now Eliza, for once, to be serious”

Eliza let out a sigh as if Severus had placed a heavy burden on her and slumped across his desk, shoving a stack of essays out of her way so she could mope dramatically.

“Dumbledore thinks he’ll find a horcrux in the cave and has agreed to take me with him but Tom doesn’t want to leave me alone with the old man in fear of what he will do. There’s a potion that’s used to guard the ‘horcrux’ that hopefully Dumbledore will ingest, it’s supposed to create despair or something-

“Yes I am intimately acquainted with that potion” Severus cut in quietly, a grimace on his face and Eliza realised Tom must have asked the man to create it all those years ago. She elected to never tell Severus what end Regulus was met with. She feared the guilt of having a hand in his friend’s death would be too much for the man to bear.

“So Tom will arrive on the scene because we don’t know why exactly Dumbledore’s brought me along. Tom will pretend to threaten to kill me to get Dumbledore to ingest the potion, we then kill Dumbledore. I can fix his corpse using my increasingly handy necromancy if he gets too beaten up and we deliver his body back to his room or something”

Eliza paused, furrowing her brows “Or maybe we can just convince everyone he’s ran away out of shame. Or that he’s ran away with Grindelwald-

She cut herself off and gave Severus a sheepish smile “We’re still ironing out the details on that front”

“And so Albus Dumbledore will be no more” Severus said after a brief silence, sombre and yet satisfied at the same time. Eliza could replicate his feelings. Albus Dumbledore was a great wizard, maybe even a great man.

But he would not listen, and he had committed as many atrocities as Tom in his quest for ‘greatness’

He had to be stopped, and they would be the ones to do so.

“And yet he will still die a martyr” Severus pointed out with a sneer “He’ll be glorified even in death”

Eliza allowed a wide smirk to spread across her face “Just leave that to me”

If Eliza just killed the man then that would be a revenge poorly executed, no, Eliza would ruin that man and everything he stood for.

And she and Tom would finish this as it had begun, they would do it together.

~

The following Monday’s issue of The Insider was one of the most damning yet.

‘SKELETONS IN THE CLOSEST’ the headline read and beneath was a very old family photo of the Dumbledore’s. Aberforth, Albus and of course Arianna. The sister that no one knew about, until now. Rita had visited Gordric’s Hallow and just so happened to run into Bathilda Bagshot who had some rather fascinating tales to tell.