"So," said Voldemort, "I really think that perhaps an explanation is very much in order."
"Do you?" replied Lucius. "Well, I rather think some fawning adoration would be in order."
"Pardon?" said Bellatrix.
"I wiped out all of Hogwarts!"
"Technically, only the Professors," replied Voldemort, "and we've already offered you cookies."
"Well for God's sake," retorted Lucius, "is that it? Where are the eccentric socks I've come to expect? Where are my countless galleons? Where are my screaming fans? Where's my castle in Scotland? Quite frankly, why, after escaping from jail and gaining a stupendous victory for our cause, should I be accorded less respect than authors of certain children's books? For years I've been hunting this victory like a Dragon, and now I've come to you, I've laid it's carcass at your feet, and you repay me with… cookies?"
"Really good cookies," Voldemort noted. "I'll even let you have one with the chocolate chips evenly distributed. I'm not sure you're aware of this, but an even distribution of chocolate chips marks the official cookie of a Dark Lord."
"Are you out of your mind?" asked Lucius.
Bellatrix and Voldemort exchanged a meaningful look. They both wanted desperately to be seen as the craziest villains who ever crazed, but couldn't tell people that, as the test of insanity is not knowing you are insane yourself. Thus, if they told anyone, everyone would know they were perfectly sane, just cute and eccentric, and they would never inspire fear, only fluff and cuddles.
"You call me mad, lad?" asked Voldemort. Voldemort liked the slight quality of a muggle high school production of Brigadoon that his unorthodox phrasing brought into that sentence. Also, the fact that mad and lad rhymed. Bellatrix nudged him approvingly.
"No, no," replied Lucius, "I know you're not actually mad. Incompetence, after all, isn't a true mark of madness. The vast majority of the world is incompetent. I, however, am more competent than anything."
Voldemort and Bellatrix sighed in unison.
"So, then," murmured Lucius, rubbing his hands together, "I see you want an explanation. Will I be rewarded after such an explanation?"
"You might get another cookie," said Voldemort. "I think you'd best just tell us regardless though. Otherwise no one will ever believe you."
"The ventilation duct," declared Lucius proudly. "I put vaporized arsenic in the ventilation duct. I lured all the children outside. I told them it was a picnic!"
"We had that idea, too!" squealed Bellatrix.
"Well, not the ventilation duct," replied Voldemort, "just the picnic part. Please, do go on."
"Actually, that was more or less it," replied Lucius. "I'm sorry there wasn't more."
"You wanted Caligulan rewards in exchange for a three sentence explanation?" queried Voldemort.
"Quite frankly, yes, yes I did," retorted Lucius.
"And Harry Potter," murmured Severus oblivious to the rest of the conversation, "he's dead."
"Drug overdose. I actually thought it might have been some of the arsenic, but I honestly don't know if that child hadn't already been exposed to so much in the way of illegal chemical substances that arsenic might not have had any effect on him. Downing a whole bottle of Vicodin though, that had an effect. Too bad. I would have brought him to Voldemort to act as some sort of odd little marionette or baker of cookies, or whatever your nefarious plans for him were, but it seems he's out of the way entirely now. Quite a relief, I think, as far as we're concerned."
"Dead…" whispered Hermione.
"Well, he's no great loss, honestly," said Severus. "I mean, if an impartial observer were to watch Hogwarts, they'd certainly prefer to pay attention to, oh, say, Hermione and myself, than to that Potter brat. I imagine that one could forget about Harry Potter almost entirely, as our lives are so much more interesting."
"I always thought you secretly liked him and were trying to defend him," replied Hermione.
"No, actually, I've always thought he was a bit of a dolt. And very unpleasant to me personally. I had very little cause to like him. Pity, of course, but these things do happen."
"These things do happen?" replied Hermione. "These things do happen?" She began to cry. And the glorious spirit of irony and detachment that had hovered and glimmered about the quartet for such a long time suddenly evaporated.
"Oh, don't cry," said Bellatrix, "it'll make you all puffy. Just imagine what Narcissa would say."
"Actually, Narcissa is dead too," replied Lucius.
"You don't seem very unhappy about it," said Bellatrix.
"I think it may be for the best – I recently discovered that she was about to put a fearsome eugenics policy into action, wherein she would castrate certain people according to her whims. It's kind of creepy, when you think about it. People who design laws like that have it within them to wreck havoc on a whole multitude of people."
"Mmm," said Bellatrix, eating a cookie.
"Have you people no sense of decency?" cried Hermione. "You were her sister! And you her husband!"
"I've said this before and I'll say it again," said Bellatrix, "it's not how many people you kill; it's how you treat the people who are alive. Besides, we've known so many people we've liked a great deal – much more than anyone dead at the moment – that it's lost some of its novelty. Please forgive us if we're touched with a modicum of compassion fatigue."
"Hermione," said Voldemort, "you should be happy. We've won! Now we can institute all the programs we hoped to! Elfton will be known the whole world over! Elves will be given rights! Dementors will be given… happy things! Risks as to muggle exposure will be significantly lessened! Dance! Dance! Dance!"
Voldemort clasped Bellatrix in his skeletal arms and they broke into a feisty polka. The hurling motions were incredibly difficult for Voldemort in his current reptilian body, but they were more or less able to keep the pace. Lucius clapped his hands in a way that would have been in time to the music, if there were music, which there wasn't. If someone had been so inclined – and certainly, no one would have been – Bellatrix's skirt lifted in such a way that one could see her underpants, upon which she had meticulously written Voldemort's name over and over in black felt pen. Had Hermione seen that fateful sight, she would have wondered whether it was possible to love one human (or Snake Lord) more intensely, if you treated the rest of humanity with blatant disregard. It was quite possible thi was the case. Because there could be absolutely no contesting either Voldemort or Bellatrix's pure, radiant happiness and adoration of each other at the moment of their victory – they lit up the room as if they were electric.
Hermione sat back in her chair and wondered to herself, 'How can two people, two people be so happy, when it's practically the end of the world? Maybe those people they killed were a little odd, and maybe they did have odd affairs with goats, but did they deserve to die for it?"
Severus, meanwhile, sat silently in his chair thinking to himself, "I wonder if Miss Granger is being all sullen because we are not dancing the polka? Perhaps I should ask her, though I would, frankly, find the act of polka-ing somewhat beneath my dignity. Also, after copulating, and now that our side has achieved victory, shouldn't Miss Granger and I be on a first name basis?"
Lucius curled up in his chair, eating a cookies and thinking to himself, "Seriously? Cookies? I'm convinced I fought for the wrong side."
Suddenly Hermione hurled herself frantically on top of Lucius in a non-sexual way, pummeling his body furiously with her fists. "How could you," she cried, "they were decent. They were perfectly good people!"
Lucius sighed. He did hate scenes, it was part of his aristocratic demeanor, "Ah," he said, "to do a great right, I do a little wrong."
"What?" replied Hermione, leaving off pummeling in pure wonder.
"The Merchant of Venice," mumbled Voldemort, who was in the process of dancing the polka, and consuming cookies, and identifying the source of Lucius's quotes, all at once, "it's Shakespeare. Now how about this, 'Politics have no relation to morals.'"
"That's Machiavelli," said Severus, somewhat delighted that they were going to play quote games.
"Oh, you give us one, Sevvie," said Bellatrix, equally delighted with the turn of events.
"Alright," said Severus thoughtfully, "how's this then, 'the only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.'"
"Oh, I just read that someplace," sighed Bellatrix gnawing on her thumbnail, "Oh, wait! It's Jean Anouih, isn't it?"
There was general clapping throughout the room.
"Is this all some sort of game to you people?" asked Hermione. "I mean, genuinely, have you no decency? At long last, have you no decency?" She fled the room, disgusted, vowing to leave the Wizarding World, in which so much evil abounded, forever.
The rest of the room fell silent once more.
"Actually," Voldemort remarked pensively, "that last bit she said, that was a quote. Do you think that was intentional? Perhaps she was only joking."
"She certainly is a high strung girl," said Lucius. "I mean, you kill one measly staff at one measly school, and people get all worked up over it."
"Did she not expect us to be happy?" wondered Bellatrix.
"I'm going to run after her in a grand dramatic gesture in just a moment," said Severus, "but before I go, Lucius, would you happen to know what happened to my tapeworm? Trevor?"
"I suppose he's dead," replied Lucius.
"Oh. Pity, that," replied Severus, before grabbing his cloak and sprinting off in a grand, dramatic gesture.
Two days later, Severus would see Trevor's empty jar of formaldehyde, and he would weep precisely two tears before continuing his search for Hermione.
But Trevor wasn't dead. Trevor had pulled his tiny wormy body desperately through the grounds around Hogwarts. He had seen Albus Dumbledore fall dead in the potions room, and had enough common sense to know that it must be credited to some sort of weaponized gas. Everyone else must be dead too, then! He would never kill Hermione. He would – oh Great Tapeworm God – never see Severus again. But for now, his thoughts turned to formaldehyde! He had to find formaldehyde, or else he would die! Formaldehyde or else a human intestinal tract! He felt his innards crippling about him. He lay, gasping little tapeworm gasps by the side of the pond, ready to go up to that great intestinal tract in the sky, when the giant squid came over to him. "Trevor," the squid murmured, "you know I love you. I've always loved you. There's never been anyone for me but you, you little tapeworm, you."
"Go away," cried Trevor, "the man I love is dead. There's nothing left for me now. Just let me die in peace."
"Trevor," said the Squid, whose name, incidentally, was Squiggly, "you may not know this, but my body very closely resembles an intestinal tract. I can save your life and you can live inside me, little buddy, oh, love of my life."
"Please," moaned Trevor, "I don't want to live with you. I just want my Severus…"
Squiggly hesitated for a moment, and tried to figure out whether he could live with someone whom he loved so deeply, whom he knew would never love him. He thought of leaving then, but he knew that a world without Trevor the Tapeworm would be as black and inky as the ink he shot out of his body. And, so, at that moment, he made a choice to absorb Trevor into his own body.
So Trevor was not dead. He only he only wished he were. And for the longest time, all Trevor could do was think about Severus, and pine for Severus, and fantasize about Severus, who, in this case, quite literally, didn't know he was alive. Sometimes, never knowing that Snape had only shed two tears for him, he would imagine that Severus was out there, combing the earth searching for him. It was a fantasy that kept him alive for that first difficult year. But after that, he began to listen to the stories Squiggly told. And while he couldn't compare with the low silky timbre of Snape's voice, after a while Trevor came to realize that Squiggly made him laugh – or as close as he could come to a laugh while underwater, and living as a parasite inside a squid. He was also very easy to talk to. It didn't happen all at once, but over the course of the next five years, Trevor's grudging acceptance of Squiggly turned into respect, and from respect into friendship, and out that friendship bubbled a greater love than either one had ever thought possible. And one fine day they copulated, in the way squids and tapeworms are wont to do such things. They waited for Trevor to get pregnant, and give birth to their bizarre interspecies child, but this did not happen, as they were both males. Finally, they decided to cast away their primitive attachments to both their races, and adopt a first year Ravenclaw orphan named Mei Ling, after Trevor explained that if she didn't get herself some parents soon, she would either die of a drug overdose, or become an evil overlord. Mei Ling, needless to say, went on to have a most strange and extraordinary life, but that is another story.