AUTHOR'S NOTE: Actually, no, I'm not dead yet! I just got a full-time job and went through a week of hellish, brain-melting training that made me feel rather dead, and the remaining howevermany weeks were spent in retrieving said brain with a shop vac, reassembling it (the brain, not the shop vac), figuring out the hard way that it won't go in through my ear when it's solid, re-melting it, pouring it in through my ear, and re-solidifying it once it was where it was meant to be. Oh, and also figuring out the logistics of a Chinese star—but we're not there yet.
So I'm sorry for the wait; here's the chapter you've all been waiting for…or something.
PS And a personal note for the Omaha werewolf (you know who you are): Be of good cheer; your time is coming—MUAHAHAHAHA!
Chapter 9: The Yellow Gates Open
Ancalimë and Bet reappeared in their flat, and Marzipan dashed into the living room to bite the former solidly on the toe of her boot. The evil writer sighed feelingly and, ignoring the cat completely, walked into the kitchen and made herself a whiskey sour.
"So now what're you going to do?" Bet asked.
Ancalimë shrugged. "I was thinking about making shepherd's pie for dinner," she replied. "Interested?"
"I meant about the war," Bet countered.
"Oh." Ancalimë started digging through the freezer. "Don't you know that narrative time stops when the writer's not writing? Hey, do we have any onions?"
"Not in the freezer," Bet replied dryly. "So how long is this little narrative hiatus going to take?"
"I'm getting ground beef out of the freezer," Ancalimë told her, closing the door, "and once I've figured out how to get up to the part about the Chinese star, I'll start writing again. Unless I'm still cooking dinner, in which case I'll talk to myself incessantly about it, the better to keep it in my head until I can get free to write. Do we have real potatoes? I hate making real food with fake ingredients."
"Good thing that rule doesn't extend to your stories," Bet commented.
Ancalimë snorted. "No kidding," she rejoined. "I'd never get anything written!"
---
The characters, meanwhile, were in a state of suspended animation, blissfully unaware that a month passed in between blinks of their eyes. Snape stood exactly as Bet and Ancalimë had left him in the empty common room, and behind the closed door of Hufflepuff, plotters paused in mid-plot, without having the slightest inkling (of either the Tolkien or Lewis variety) that they did so. It was all rather fairy tale-esque, except that there was no princess waiting to be kissed—or rather, if there was, she would appear retroactively, and then only after some writer somewhere wrote her in.
Only Pinky and the Brain were active during this time (and that only retroactively), but alas, the Brain's scheme to take over the world by discovering and applying worldwide the secret of suspended animation failed because, in the end, he wasn't the writer.
After a month, however, the writer again set pen to paper, vowing to resolve the difficulty of the Chinese star as she went, and everyone awoke with absolutely no idea of having been asleep—until they realized that they had suddenly surfaced a third of the way into the next chapter, of course.
---
Reginald, Harry, and Bonfoy crept out of Slytherin in the early hours of the morning and made their way (Reginald going on all fours for some reason) to the entrance to Hufflepuff. The house elf grew more and more agitated as they drew closer, and his muttering at last got so much on the Slytherins' nerves that Bonfoy pulled out a roll of duct tape and brandished it menacingly.
"Nooo!" Reginald wailed. "It burns us, it does! Nasty Muggles twisted it—"
"Then shut up!" Bonfoy growled, and Reginald did—mostly. They still had to put up with the occasional whimper, but it was far better than the incessant muttering had been.
When the three of them arrived at Hufflepuff, they hid in a shadowy alcove within sight of the entrance and near a steep stairway. Snape had assigned Harry and Bonfoy to be lookouts, and Reginald…well, he had insisted on coming at the behest of the evil narrator.
"It's so quiet," Bonfoy whispered.
"It won't be for long," Harry whispered back.
As if that pessimistic observation was a signal, the door to Hufflepuff slowly opened, and a long column of teenage soldiers marched out.
"A lot of horses going cold tonight without their blankets," Bonfoy marveled in a horrified tone. "Those are the most awful-looking uniforms I've ever seen!"
Harry nodded in agreement. Reginald, meanwhile, huddled up with his hands over his ears and whimpered.
There was something horribly mesmerizing about the yellow, red, and black plaid uniforms, though, and without realizing it, Harry took a few steps toward the still-emerging column. He was checked by a fervent tug at his sleeve, and, snapping out of it, he whirled to face a suddenly very urgent Reginald.
"No!" the house elf whispered desperately. "They'll catch you!" He would have said more, but he broke off in a chorus of strange coughing.
Bonfoy stared at Reginald a moment, then looked back at Harry. "Is it just me, or does he suddenly sound more like Andy Serkis than Ahmed Best?"
Harry scratched the top of his Afro. "I think you're right," he replied. "He must be recovering his sanity—who in their right minds would choose Jar-Jar over Gollum as a role model?"
"Spies!"
Harry whirled again, then went even paler than Bonfoy. Bonfoy, not to be outdone, paled further, and Reginald bested both of them by producing Halloween makeup and painting his face white. None of that being important, however, the writer decided she had best describe what exactly it was that caused these reactions:
Hannah Abbott had seen them and was pointing their way.
"Oh, shit," Bonfoy muttered.
"No problem," Harry said calmly, then drew forth from his pocket something his father had given him during a scene that had been cut for time: a silver Chinese star. He had kept it with him for good luck and also because he figured that sooner or later the writer would make use of it as a handy plot contrivance.
He took careful aim at Hannah's heart, let fly, and—
And with a sudden crack, a plot complication appeared on the scene in the person of Voldemort and the further persons of several Death Eaters, all wearing red shirts beneath their robes. Voldemort apparated directly in front of Hannah, and the star hit, not the Hufflepuff general for whom it had been intended, but the Dark Lord. It cut through his robes and skin like butter, embedding in his heart.
The world seemed to freeze for a long, terrible moment, and then Voldemort started simultaneously screaming and hissing.
"I thought only cats could do that," Harry commented.
Bonfoy shrugged. "This is fanfic," he replied. "We can do whatever the narrator says."
"I'm melting!" Voldemort wailed. "Oh, my beautiful villainy, evility, and really cool fight scenes at the ends of movies! Melting…melting…melting…"
He had, indeed, started out melting, but once he'd gotten to about half his original size, he appeared to change his mind regarding the means of his demise and finished instead by exploding in a ball of blue coronal fire guaranteed to put even Emperor Palpatine to shame.
The force of the explosion knocked over everyone except for the Death Eaters, who were instead conveniently vaporized and settled over the corridor in a thin layer of ash before the first commercial.
Hannah Abbott was the first on her feet. "Kill the Slytherins!" she screamed, holding a hand over her left eye. "It was a Hufflepuff who killed You-Know-Who—they're the only ones who'll say otherwise!"
Before the Hufflepuffs could carry out that order, however, an army of reporters appeared suddenly in the corridor and surrounded Harry and Bonfoy, shouting out questions and broadcasting the interview live.
Bonfoy arched an eyebrow. "Convenient."
"Mr. Snape!" called out one reporter. "What were you doing outside of Hufflepuff in the first place?"
Harry grinned at the seething Hannah Abbott, then proceeded to tell the world everything he knew about the Hufflepuff conspiracy. Before he had done with the interview, a sizable group of constables had arrived on the scene and started detaining the Hufflepuffs for questioning.
Reginald, meanwhile, had scurried away unnoticed and now returned, holding the Chinese star that had killed Voldemort. He smiled, not at all sanely, and lightly traced the scorch marks on it with his fingertip.
"My Precious!" he crooned.
Bonfoy gulped. "Um Harry?" he said quietly. "I think it's time we left. Reginald's acting a bit…off."
Harry quickly wrapped up and excused himself from the reporters, and they started back toward Slytherin. "What are you carrying Reginald?" he asked.
"Mustn't ask us!" Reginald snapped. "Not its business!" And with that he skittered away and out of sight.
Harry glanced worriedly at Bonfoy. "I don't think we've seen the last of him."
Bonfoy shrugged. "Better him than Fleur Delacour," he replied. "Anyway, it's nearly time for Chapter Ten. What say we get Pansy and go out for some butterbeer?"
"Sounds good."
