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Malfoy Manor’s drawing room looked like a museum of expensive bad decisions. Dark wood. Darker velvet. A chandelier that had never once paid taxes.
Voldemort lounged in Lucius’s favorite chair like a cat who’d skinned the previous cat and kept the fur as a throw. Nagini dozed in a lazy coil. Death Eaters ringed the walls, pretending they weren’t sweaty in their masks.
“Lucius,” Voldemort said, not looking up from the Daily Prophet crossword, “what is a seven-letter word for ‘half-blood who thinks he’s clever’?”
Lucius made a small, hopeful noise. “Severus?”
Before Voldemort could flick the paper at him, the air went pop—house-elf Apparition, the kind that slipped straight through wards made by better men than Lucius.
Dobby arrived wearing sixteen hats stacked like a wobbly wedding cake, twenty-seven mismatched socks pulled over his arms like bracers, and a hand-knit sweater with “FREE AS HELL” stitched on the front in bright, offended letters. He held, in both small hands, a very illegal Muggle thing: blocky, heavy, and unmistakably Not Magic.
“What,” said Voldemort, calm and thin as paper, “is that?”
Dobby lifted his chin, socks quivering with righteous purpose. “Mr. Harry Potter, sir,” Dobby said, every word a drumbeat, “sends his regards.”
Silence. Then:
Bellatrix giggled. “Oh, how delicious. The little elf brought a toy—”
The “toy” thunked onto the polished table with enough authority to make the chandelier tattle on itself. Every Death Eater flinched. Lucius took a conservative step behind the drapes.
Voldemort raised his wand. “Av—”
Dobby snapped his fingers.
The killing curse hiccuped like it forgot its lines. The green light rolled over in the air and went out with a sheepish pfft. The chandelier clinked in embarrassment.
“House-elf magic,” Dobby said, very politely. “No spells in Dobby’s space, sir.”
Voldemort’s red eyes narrowed. “You presume—”
“Dobby presumes freedom,” Dobby said, and the room listened. The hats didn’t look silly anymore. The socks were banners. “Dobby also presumes Mr. Harry Potter, sir, is done playing fair.”
Across the room, a Death Eater in a snake mask hissed, “It’s a Muggle firearm.”
“Fire…arm?” Voldemort tasted the word like he might spit it out. “Lucius?”
Lucius gave a helpless little shrug that said my son knows about broom models, my Lord, not…whatever this is. He tried, “It goes bang.”
“Everything I do goes bang,” Voldemort said, affronted.
“Not like this,” Dobby said.
He placed one small finger along the side of the blocky object with the solemnity of a priest christening a ship. He didn’t explain it—didn’t need to. He looked straight at Voldemort.
“Mr. Harry Potter, sir, would like you to consider a holiday,” Dobby said. “Far from Britain. Far from children. Very far from pretending you are a king of anything. Mr. Harry Potter, sir, says you can choose retirement or consequences.”
Every masked head ticked toward Voldemort. The Dark Lord smiled in the way snakes don’t. “Consequences,” he purred, “are for the powerless.”
Dobby’s ears twitched. “Dobby used to think like that. Then Dobby got socks.”
Bellatrix’s giggle died in her throat.
Nagini lifted her head, tasting the air, eyes locked on Dobby. The room held its breath.
“Dobby does not want to make holes in people,” Dobby said, steady. “But Dobby will make the point.”
He raised the gun and squeezed—once, twice.
The sound wasn’t magic. It was a hard crack that slapped the walls. Nagini snapped mid-coil; the great body thumped off the table leg and went long and still. A dark stain spread across the runner. The chandelier, for once in its life, found a reason to be quiet.
Voldemort screamed.
Not theatrical—human. He doubled over, one hand white-knuckled on the chair arm, the other clawing the air like he could catch the pain. Every Death Eater flinched as if the force had moved through them, too. Something thin and wrong hissed in the corners and guttered out, like a candle that discovered it had been burning a thread of soul.
“House-elf magic,” Dobby said, voice calm again. He flicked his fingers; the green curse Bellatrix had started to shape died like a yawn that thought better of itself. “No spells in Dobby’s space.”
Nagini did not move. Not a twitch. Not a breath. The Dark Lord shook with the absence.
Dobby didn’t lower the gun. “One of your anchors,” he said, almost apologetic and somehow not. “Gone. You feel it.”
Voldemort’s eyes were murder and something new behind it—hollow. “You—”
“Choices,” Dobby cut in, gentle as a closed door. “One: you run far away and change your name to something silly. Two: you try again, and next time Dobby will not start with pets.”
Snap.
Every wand in the room tore free and was pinned to the ceiling like ugly ornaments. Masks unclipped and clattered to the floor. Lucius’s ribbon untied itself and slithered away in shame.
Dobby set the gun on the table in front of Voldemort. Not pointed. Just present. Heavy. “Keep it,” he said softly. “So you remember there are bangs you did not invent.”
He straightened, sixteen hats like a crown. “Mr. Harry Potter, sir, sends his regards,” Dobby said, and nodded at the still coil on the rug. “And his boundaries.”
Then he popped away, leaving socks in the air like confetti and a quiet that hurt.
For a long moment, no one moved. Voldemort stared at the stain on the white runner, at the slack curve of a body that would not rise, at the tremor that wouldn’t leave his hands.
“Find me the boy,” he said at last, voice low and wrong-edged. “And find me how to kill an elf.”
No one mentioned that they’d just watched him fail. No one dared mention the missing piece.
In a kitchen on Privet Drive, a boy leaned his elbows on a table that had held too many cold meals and stared at the night. His chest felt lighter and heavier at once. He had not slept. He had not cried. He had not apologized to the air for existing, not even once, and that felt like a new spell.
“Thank you, Dobby,” Harry said to the quiet, and the quiet, for once, didn’t ask him to be smaller.
Somewhere far away in a terrible house, something that thought it was a god looked at a very human hole in a very stupid peacock and learned a very late lesson:
Not all bangs are green.