Disclaimer: Would a smart Voldemort really have let Harry talk for that long in the middle of the final battle? No? Then I am not JK Rowling and do not own Harry Potter.

Parts of this story are quoted from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Dumbledore had said that Lord Voldemort took no trouble to comprehend that which he did not value: house elves and children's tales, love, loyalty, and innocence. That he underestimated those things which he despised—to his cost. The old fool.

"You won't be killing anyone else tonight," said Harry as they circled, and stared into each other's eyes, green into red. "You won't be able to kill any of them ever again. Don't you get it? I was ready to die to stop you from hurting these people—"

"But you did not!"

"—I meant to, and that's what did it. I've done what my mother did. They're protected from you. Haven't you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can't torture them. You can't touch them. You don't learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?"

"You dare—" Voldemort hissed, but the response was automatic, for in his mind, he was carefully calculating. Dumbledore had always thought him an arrogant fool, but it was Dumbledore himself who had never outgrown the arrogance and foolishness of his youth. He had simply exhibited it in more subtle ways. So enamoured was he of the power of love that he believed that one who did not love could not understand it and would never account for it. Utter nonsense, Voldemort thought. He might detest love, but he would have to be blind not to see its effects.

Worse yet, Dumbledore had seemed to think that without love, Voldemort must be mad—so mad that he would not learn from his mistakes. To be sure, he had made quite a few of them, and he had, in his desperation, charged down dangerous paths that he would not have otherwise considered.

But Lord Voldemort was no fool.

And so he let Potter prattle on about Snape and Dumbledore and the Elder Wand, and about insipid things like love and remorse, giving away his entire plan like the villain in a children's play, thinking he had already won. Voldemort almost felt sorry for the boy. He seemed to have adopted Dumbledore's arrogance, lock, stock, and barrel, as the muggles so curiously said.

"So it all comes down to this, doesn't it?" whispered Harry. "Does the wand in your hand know its last master was Disarmed? Because if it does…"

But he never got to finish that sentence, because as they circled, Voldemort had lined the pair of them up exactly where he wanted them, and while Potter was still rambling on, he cast a silent, but very powerful Summoning Charm.

Harry Potter died when Bellatrix Lestrange's knives slammed into his back.

A red-gold glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them as an edge of a dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. There was a single moment of awed and horrified silence. A golden glow brighter than the dawn light surrounded Voldemort as he felt power coursing through his body. The cracks that had opened in the Elder Wand healed themselves, as he was now truly its master. He looked down at his enemy's shell, face-down and limp, with half a dozen knives protruding from his back.

"I don't learn from my mistakes, do I?" he hissed.

There was a roar of triumph as the Death Eaters broke free of their captors. Most of them were still alive to go on fighting. (Soft-hearted fools, the defenders were.) For his own part, Voldemort didn't even bother to see if his curses would bind on his enemies, now. He merely waved the Elder Wand and banished bits of rubble into their heads and chests with the force of a muggle bullet.

"Take Potter's friends alive!" he ordered. He would interrogate them later for anything Potter had left out. "And do not harm the children more than necessary…Kill the rest!"

He would build a new, stronger Magical Britain, he thought as he brought down the former heads of the houses of Hogwarts, McGonagall, Flitwick, and Sprout. (Slughorn he left alive—the old man might yet be useful.) It was true, Bellatrix was dead, and the Malfoys had betrayed him. Both were heavy blows, but he would recover. Theodore Nott had lately been more reliable than Draco Malfoy, anyway—and smarter. And young Pansy Parkinson was proving to be surprisingly adept at following in dear Bella's footsteps.

Yes, Lord Voldemort would build a strong and loyal nation out of the next generation, restoring the purebloods to their proper place, but magnanimously allowing the best and brightest of the half-bloods and even mudbloods to breed in with them. (He was not so blind as to miss the Granger whelp's brilliance, and he knew from his own heritage that there was more to blood than mere pedigree.) The muggles—he would keep them around to work the soil and do the menial labour. Sociopath he may be, but Lord Voldemort did know how to run a country. And as for himself, he may be out of horcruxes, but there were other ways of cheating death, and now that he had the run of the place, he could investigate them at his leisure.

Hmm…God-Emperor Voldemort had a nice ring to it.