Chapter Three (I shall call him squishy, and he will be mine, and he will be my squishy)

Floating, floating... Harry gently rocked back and forth inside his jar. At this time he'd given up on the mental imagery of being an octopus. Yup.

Now he rather thought he was more of a jellyfish. Squishy and with lots of weird looking tentacle-like things coming out of his underside. Or at least, that's what he imagined he looked like. The interesting thing about being a brain was that you didn't actually have eyes, and were thus blind.

Hence, Harry had never looked in a mirror. However, he remembered the brains he'd seen in fifth year, and while they were fairly ugly and odd colored, they did rather resemble jellyfish.

Sort of.

Apparently he rocked a little too hard because he soon found himself falling. He landed hard on his side and flopped a bit.

Ow

Voldemort let out a cry of frustration as Harry – though Voldemort didn't know it was Harry, since all the brains pretty much looked alike – landed on his desk.

"What is wrong with you – you things?" he muttered. He reached out to pick the brain up, but aborted the movement immediately. Ew, like he wanted to touch a brain, of all things. He wasn't even wearing gloves. And he wouldn't have anywhere to put it anyway since the jar had shattered, and the brains had been quick to prove that no, they didn't like sharing each others jars, thank you very much.

Except for a certain two, who... but Voldemort didn't want to think about that.

One of the brain's tentacles reached out and grabbed him by the wrist and Voldemort almost jerked away before he heard a rather groggy voice in his head. At which point he wanted to jerk away even more, but he refrained.

Since he was nice.

'Hi.'

"Let. Go," said Voldemort stiffly. The tentacle around his wrist was really starting to bother him. It was slimy, and disgusting, and slimy... Voldemort didn't like slimy. It reminded him of... slimy things.

'Why?' asked the brain, which Voldemort was pretty sure was Potter. It sounded like Potter, anyway, and was certainly just as annoying.

"Because I said to let go, that's why," said Voldemort in irritation. A quick glance around showed that all the brains were watching the show, tentacles outstretched in interest.

Voldemort shuddered. He really needed to reconsider the whole having the brains in his office thing.

'Mmm... No.' Voldemort stared at the brain in disbelief. Oh yes, it was most definitely Potter, because only Potter was this insufferable. Not even Dumbledore came close. Voldemort wondered once more what had possessed him to put his enemy's brains in jars, instead of killing them outright.

Oh, right, the whole 'chance to torment them for eternity' thing. Was he allowed to change his mind?

"Why not?" Voldemort asked, before he had time to consider it further. Wouldn't it have been more Evil Dark Lord-ish if he'd just jerked his hand away and ripped the thing's tentacle off?

Then again... ew.

'Wanna ask you something,' said the brain.

"Fine, what?" asked Voldemort, only now noticing that there was a positively indecent amount of brain slime all over his documents. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

'Can I have a bigger jar?'

'Tag, you're it!' Harry quickly swam away from Hermione as she started to chase after him. Voldemort, in response to Harry's request, had dumped all of the brains into a giant aquarium.

Which meant two things: one, they no longer resided in Voldemort's office, but rather in his reception room; and two, Snape was very unhappy. Currently Snape was sulkily inhabiting one of the bottom corners of the tank, fully prepared to beat on anyone who came near him with his tentacles.

Just then several men apparated into the reception room, causing several of the brains to swim to that wall of the aquarium in interest. Harry laughed when several of the Death Eaters moved as far away from the aquarium as they could. He swam up to the top of the tank and reached his tentacles out of the water, stretching them towards the very freaked out Death Eaters.

Who backed away further.

Harry was soon joined by several other brains. Several of the Death Eaters ran into the far wall as they tried to back away even farther. Of course, the room was so small that even pressed up against the wall the Death Eaters were only a few feet away from the tank.

Another Death Eater apparated in. Noticing who it was, Harry grinned – mentally, of course.

'Malfoy!'

'What?' asked Draco irritably.

'I dare you to jump on your father's head.'

It turns out that brains make for truly fugly hats.